At a moment of such monumental geopolitical crisis, it is not surprising to see hospitality step up and play a comforting role.

I just received a letter from Michael Widmann, global CEO of PKF hospitality group in Vienna, explaining how more than 500,000 people have fled Ukraine, where half of his family is from and most of his 20 team members remain, still in Kyiv.

A person connected to Widmann’s family fled Ukraine this week and was on her way to Vienna with her two young children to stay with the PKF leader and his family. After leaving her husband behind in Kyiv and traveling 72 hours by car, she had to stop for rest in Budapest, where Norbert Lessing, the head of Hilton in Austria and a good friend of the Widmann family, had recently reached out to offer help. After a call from Widmann, Lessing reached out to Peter Knoll, director of the Budapest Hilton, who graciously provided a room for the tired family at no charge.

Widmann wrote that once he saw how easy it was to help families who were on the run from Ukraine by providing hotel accommodations for a few nights, he made his first ever post to LinkedIn with the hashtag HospitalityHelps. The reaction was was strong, he says, and including a response from Bench Events Jonathan Worsley, who subsequently reached out to the leadership of the new booking platform HotelSwaps, who also agreed to help find more rooms for Ukrainians in need.

Read the full article at HOTELS Magazine