Welcome to SMACK! Just like our name, everything we do here is a little different and yet you’ll probably have more fun here than elsewhere. SMACK Hospitality Media is your one-of-a-kind source for hospitality and tourism-related edutainment. It is our mission to provide fun and engaging content for industry professionals in modern media formats. With our podcast we aim to give everybody around the world the chance to meet key decision-makers and trailblazers of the hospitality industry. Chasing that ambitious goal, our hospitality podcast airs twice a month between September and July. So, join the conversation, tune in and never ever lose your curiosity. Enjoy the show!
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episode 82: Hubert Viriot – YOTEL | From Gatwick Airport to the world: A success story
CEO @ YOTEL
Yes, you can do things differently! Even in the hotel business.
Listen to 2024’s first smack episode and learn from YOTEL CEO Hubert Viriot how the brand has established a new status quo in the travel business over the past decade.
YOTEL has been rocking its own way from the beginning, by focusing on highly tech-savvy customers and the future of traveling, instead of sticking to beaten paths. Some of its milestones: being the first non-luxury brand in an eternity to construct a new property in New York and making hourly hotel bookings sexy again.
Hubert has not only seen this baby grow, but is said to be majorly responsible for pushing YOTEL from a unique airport hotel to a global player. His background in project development and real estate surely has helped to establish YOTEL hotels around the globe and set them into pole position as one of the first hotel brands to be involved in the development of the mega project NEOM in Saudi Arabia.
Hubert and Fritz connected at FHS and had plenty to talk about from branding, bleisure-trends and the future traveler to what YOTEL has to do with sushi. They also tackled a question, that seems to have left Fritz sleepless for a while: How many brands can a customer possibly understand?
Curios? Tune in and enjoy the show!
PS. The next FHS event by BENCH is only a couple of months away, Riyadh will be the place to be from April 29th to May 1st 2024.