Full Video: CitizenM CEO at Skift Forum Europe 2022

Skift Forum Europe

Skift Forum Europe was held in London, England on March 24, 2022. Find out about future Skift events through the link below.

Learn More

CitizenM has received a lot of acclaim for its innovative use of technology, which CEO Klaas van Lookeren Campagne believes has helped the Dutch-based hotel chain improve the visitor.

But van Lookeren Campagne told Skift Senior Travel Tech Editor Sean O'Neill at March 24 at Skift Forum Europe 2022 that the citizenM faces challenges such as international business travel, which the company relies heavily on, still not recovering to pre-Covid metrics. However, the company has been buoyed by the $1 billion it raised last year, which it intends to use to expand in the U.S.

Watch the full video of the conversation, as well as read a transcript of it, below, to hear what van Lookeren Campagne said about citizenM's successful digital strategy, its future growth plans, and much more.

Sean O'Neill: So citizenM is in the spotlight today because it stands apart from a lot of hospitality companies. It is asset heavy at a time when asset light is very trendy. It focuses on business travel at a time when leisure travel is rebounding quickly after the pandemic. It has very compact guest rooms at a time when apartment style lodging is very popular on social media, but it also says it has the most profitability per square foot of any of its hospitality peers. So we're going to find out about its strategy.

Klaas, when I told you were going to be speaking at this particular time and it was going to be right after an Expedia executive and right before a booking.com executive, you said that as a hotel, you're used to being squeezed by the online travel agencies. So you were going to be cool with this. So thank you for joining us. I wanted to talk about the news first. In November, you raised more than 800 million euros, about a billion dollars worth of capital. How are you planning to use that at citizenM?

Van Lookeren Campagne: We have a very live active development portfolio in the Europe and in the U.S. where we are building hotels, so it's quite challenging at the moment, but we want to finish them. We are opening, this year, six hotels, next year, six hotels. So roughly half of the money is going into just building our hotels, and the other half is …

We really had a very smooth, easy conversation with our shareholders. Do we only take the pain of the pandemic, or do we also get the gain? And do we believe in further growth? And we have long term shareh