Michael Levie, the CEO of CitizenM, probably the most exciting new hotel chain out there, just joined HouseTrip’s advisory board.
Michael has an impressive travel and hotel record allied to a unique vision for the industry. Upon graduating from IHMI, he worked for various international hotel chains including Sonesta Hotels and NH Hoteles all over the world. As Vice-President of Operations he managed large portfolios of hotels. Michael also worked for SynXis, where he started and headed the European office. Michael, together with a team of partners, then conceived the CitizenM brand after assessing what he saw as a stagnant mid-market hotel industry.
We are obviously very excited about the prospects for HouseTrip and are delighted to be working with Michael who will bring a highly value-added perspective to our advisory board.
Over the past few months we had been working actively with students and teachers from the Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne, the leading hospitality school in the world, in order to develop our marketing plan. We did this in the context of the “Student Business Project”: at the end of their studies at the school, all students undertake – as their final project – a consulting work submitted by an external company. This semester HouseTrip was one of those companies: some of its founders being alumni from the school, we knew about the effectiveness and the dedication students put in their studies’ last piece of work!
This Wednesday, this page in HouseTrip’s history has come to an end since the students presented their work to us and handed us out their final report. Their research of course confirmed the fantastic potential for HouseTrip and gave us some great ideas we will use to delight our future users! We are all quite excited about what is coming!
Below you can see a picture of the very international team who worked with us. From left to right: Shay Shaked from Israel, myself, Eva-Maria Hufnagel from Germany, Nadine Wirz from Switzerland, Ambika Seth from India, Martina Unternaehrer from Switzerland and Dominik, Junjun and Adrian from HouseTrip!
At the end of the project's final presentation
Apparently, in the course of the project, we even managed to convert Ambika to entrepreneurship: she wants to launch her own hospitality concept and she has the HouseTrip team best wishes and full support for that!
Thank you so much again for all your hard work and we hope to keep in touch. Please come back to this web address in the middle of the summer to see some of your recommendations being implemented on the website!
This post follows a previous one, which you can read there.
Back at home in Lausanne, I literally spent 6 months speaking about the HouseTrip idea to everyone I met. I wanted to check that it wasn’t something I was getting excited about on my own, that it was actually something people needed. It was a great feeling and it gave me confidence that everyone saw a lot of potential in the idea.
Junjun and Arnaud
On the way I had of course shared the idea with my girlfriend Junjun who, to my great delight, agreed that we should both dedicate ourselves fully to the project after we would finish our studies in January 2009 (we were both studying hospitality and tourism management at the Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne).
Read the whole post »
We did it ourselves
