What refugee clubhouses teach us about hospitality
Hospitality doesn’t always start with a front desk. Sometimes, it starts with a football, a shipping container and a place where people feel welcome again.
In a recent episode of MattTalks, Jan van Hövell, founder of KLABU, shared how sports clubhouses in refugee camps are redefining what it means to create belonging. KLABU builds community spaces in long-term refugee camps, funded through social enterprise and partnerships, including a recent collaboration with Mews. While the setting couldn’t be further from a traditional hotel, the parallels with hospitality are striking.
The simple joy of a football
Jan’s motivation for founding KLABU traces back to his childhood. His parents both worked in the refugee space, his father for the UN and his mother as an arts and crafts teacher. At 18 years old, Jan did an internship at the UN in Ghana. He translated refugee testimonies for asylum interviews and witnessed first-hand the human cost of displacement. While camps offered safety and basic necessities, life inside them often stopped at survival.
What stood out was what happened after work. Jan would bring a football into the camp and play with refugees and locals. Those moments of joy and connection stayed with him.
Years later, after leaving a successful career as an M&A lawyer, that memory became the foundation of KLABU. The idea was simple but powerful: create spaces where refugees could access sports equipment, gather safely and rebuild a sense of community.
Creating community inside a shipping container
KLABU’s first “clubhouse” began in Kenya’s Kalobeyei refugee camp. It operated like a sports library inside a shipping container. Refugees could borrow sports equipment and return it once they finished playing.
Over time, these clubhouses evolved into vibrant community hubs. Jan and his team added television, music, solar panels and Wi-Fi. People would come to borrow equipment and then stay to watch games, play music together and use the internet to study or connect with loved ones back home.
The idea of the clubhouse“started by listening and grew by listening,” Jan explains. KLABU asked people what they were missing from their daily lives and took action to provide it.
Today, KLABU operates ten clubhouses worldwide, each serving thousands of people. The organization focuses on camps where refugees stay for years, sometimes decades, and where the day-to-day can become stagnant.
Jan says solving this stagnancy is critical. For the human spirit to stay alive, for people to not lose hope and faith completely, there needs to be elements in life that go beyond survival.
Why sports matter
Food, water and safety are essential. But Jan argues that sports follow closely behind. Not as a luxury, but as a necessity for quality of life.
Sports create moments of joy and bring people together across cultural and social divides. In refugee camps, they also act as a form of protection, helping young people find structure and community alongside host populations.
After you've played a game of football, or any other sport, that is where you can build bridges,
Jan says. That’s where you can build not alone, but together.
Value-led partnerships
KLABU’s growth has been shaped by deliberate choices about who it works with. Jan has turned down major funding from partners that didn’t align with the organization’s values.
That mindset shaped its partnership with Mews, which now supports a KLABU clubhouse in Boa Vista, Brazil – Latin America’s largest shelter for indigenous refugees and migrants fleeing Venezuela. The long-term goal is to fund the clubhouse for three years, then hand it over to local partners to ensure sustainability.
A shared definition of welcome
Jan sees a natural connection between KLABU and hospitality. A hotel is a welcoming place. It’s where people feel they belong, even when they’re away from home.
That definition applies just as much in a refugee camp as it does in a hotel or resort. The environment differs, but the emotional need is the same.
In hotels, experiences matter. Guests might book a bed, but what they remember is how a place made them feel. The way staff treated them and the special touches they didn’t expect. It’s the element of humanness that drives a human-based industry like hospitality.
And as a hospitality business, Mews couldn’t ask for a more aligned partnership. While they operate in different environments, Mews and KLABU share a vision: to improve the human experience. We run very different businesses,
Matt elaborates. But at the end of it, we want to do good, and we want to make the world a better place.
To learn more about KLABU and its partnership with Mews, watch the full MattTalks episode.
For those who want to support KLABU directly, you can purchase one of their clubhouse shirts here. Proceeds help fund clubhouses in refugee camps around the world.
About Mews
Mews is the operating system for hospitality, unifying workflows across revenue, operations and the guest journey so teams can automate the mundane and focus on memorable guest experiences. The Mews platform spans PMS, POS, RMS, Housekeeping and Payments, helping hoteliers move from property management to profit management. Powering 15,000 customers across 85 countries, the company was named Best PMS (2024, 2025, 2026), Best POS (2026) and listed among the Best Places to Work in Hotel Tech for six years running by Hotel Tech Report.
