122 – TMG Hospitality Trailblazers: Oliver Winter

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

Join Suite Spot host, Ryan Embree as he welcomes TMG Hospitality Traiblazer, Oliver Winter, to the podcast. Oliver is the founder and CEO of a&o Hostels which is the largest independent hostel chain in Europe! These two discuss the hostel experience, a&o’s commitment to green initiatives and sustainability, and the resurgence of the solo traveler. Tune in now to see how Oliver and a&o are making a big difference in hospitality across the globe. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check-in, and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. All right. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree, thank you so much for joining us, for listening to us, to watching us wherever you are, finding us here. We are here at the Content Creation Studio for another episode of TMG Hospitality Trailblazers. I am so excited to bring in my next guest, certainly a trailblazer, and what Oliver and his group are doing right now. Certainly, fantastic. We're gonna get a lot to it. So, let me go ahead and bring him in. Oliver Winter, founder and CEO of a&o Hostels. Oliver, thank you so much for jumping on the Suite Spot with me. Oliver Winter: Yeah, thanks Ryan, for having me here. Thank you very much. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. And we're gonna have some fun today. We're gonna talk about a&o all the initiatives that you guys are doing and this incredible growth that you're seeing. I think you bring a really unique perspective, but for those that have not listened to this series before, this is our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers, where we spotlight those individuals and management companies, uh, groups like a&o that are really trailblazing the path forward. So we have the pleasure of speaking with Oliver today, but Oliver, before we get into everything that we're doing right now, or even what's in the future, I wanna start with the past because this is one of my favorite questions we've been doing this series, which is almost a year old now, is tell us a little bit about your hospitality background, because we have such unique stories in our industry that I feel like rarely get told. We all talk about the, the exciting things that are happening right now, and maybe in the future, but a lot of us in hospitality, you had some very unique backgrounds before we got to the place that we were. So tell us a little bit about your background and what led you to ultimately founding a&o. Oliver Winter: Yeah, thanks. Yeah, happy to do this. Uh, so yeah, as a, as a young man between school and university, I, I had time to travel around the world and, um, came in touch with this hostel concept in many different countries. And what I saw, I liked really much so affordable stay, uh, you have with a warm shower, safe bed, a kitchen to share, a place to hang around and, and, uh, a place even very easy to come in touch with other travelers. So back to Berlin. Then, in these days, I started to study to become a teacher so far away from hospitality background parallel. During my studies, I investigated the Berlin Hostel market, and there've been in this time just non-commercial providers, like Y-M-C-A-Y-J, et cetera. So no private independent hostel. So with, with a lot of patients. And, and little luck of course, as well. So, 23 years ago, then I founded, um, AO in Berlin, opened a a 164 beds hostel. That was the very beginning, 164 beds. And it was, uh, it was from the first moment, it was great success. And, um, so then I stopped my studies and, and focused to grow this company and, and adding more bets first in Berlin later than in other cities in Germany, and then in other European countries.