The Big-Money Reinvention of the Humble Hostel: A Skift Deep Dive
Photo Credit: Jo and Joe Hossegor. AccorHotels came up with the concept inhouse. AccorHotels
Skift Take
Money is flowing into the hostels market and established hotel companies want a piece. Will this new corporatization cost hostels the soul of their original mission?
It took AccorHotels only 18 months to bring its hostel-like concept Jo&Joe to life.
The hospitality giant had been watching the sector, studying where it might be able to make its mark before it hit on, what it thought, was the right approach.
"The market has changed and for us it was a time just to see that this kind of market is going more and more professional with bigger brands, with real concepts and we decided to get into it," François Leclerc, vice president of brand and operations at Jo&Joe, told Skift.
The likes of Accor and now Hilton, think the hostel market is ripe for disruption. These are not scrappy upstarts but rather the established hotel companies looking to use their scale to pick up a different type of consumer.
Hostels certainly aren't a new invention; they have been around for more than a century but up until fairly recently they weren’t part of the wider hospitality conversation. Sure, as a business
