What happens when hoteliers decide to break the mold – and the front desk?

At Mews Unfold in Amsterdam, Matt Welle brought three hoteliers onto the main stage. Each, in their own way, has decided the traditional hotel model wasn't working.  

Stijn Soolsma runs Hotel De Durgerdam for Aedes Places. Josef Vollmayr co-founded Limehome. Mirco Weber led the tech and concept overhaul at AMANO Group. None of them build hotels the same way, and none of them particularly wanted to. 

The common thread isn't technology. It’s a decision, made early and kept to under pressure, that the standard hotel format wasn't fit for what they wanted to deliver. Here’s how they broke the mould. 

Removing the front desk – literally 

For AMANO, the shift came out of a system switch that turned into something bigger. When the group modernized its tech stack around Mews, they went further than swapping software.

Mirco recalls a conversation with Ariel, the group’s CEO. Once he realized the power of a connected system, he said: "We will not only do a system switch, but also a concept switch. When we roll out Mews, with this we kill the front office." 

If it sounds a little dramatic, it’s because that reflects the seismic nature of the shift. The physical reception desk came out. The lobby was redesigned by AMANO's in-house architects and rebuilt to combine front office with food and beverage into a single team. 

The system wasn't the hard part. The culture shift was. There was resistance to role sharing but, as Mirco says, “it works better day by day.” 

Hiring got harder too, since "ground floor staff" isn't a job title anyone recognizes yet. But the payoff is real, even if it doesn't show up as a tidy revenue line. "I would say we see it in a guest experience. That's the most relevant part." 

Building the opposite way, on purpose 

Josef Vollmayr came at hospitality from a different direction entirely: zero days of hotel experience, a McKinsey background, and investors expecting a tech story that could justify high valuations.  

Limehome was built on three bets stacked together: automation and digitization; flexible real estate that could fit almost any building type; and an apartment-style product that gave Airbnb's market the quality standard it never had. 

The result is a company managing around 13,000 rooms across Europe, where "ninety percent of our stays are handled without any manual interaction." Guests check in through an app, get a door code, and rarely speak to anyone.  

Josef is candid that some hoteliers won’t agree with their philosophy. "It's not the basic thought of hospitality," he admitted, and Limehome is now testing on-site hosts at a handful of properties. These hosts are freed from reception tasks entirely, ensuring they add back the human moments automation can't manufacture on its own. 

Starting small enough to get it right 

At the other end of the spectrum sits De Durgerdam, Aedes Places' fourteen-room hotel just outside Amsterdam. Stijn Soolsma's team never installed a desk in the first place. 

"There will not be a desk when you will come in," he said of the concept. "We will have a space for people that either don't get along with technology, don't want to check in online or just prefer to have that. So we can guide you there, but it will start with a person." 

The same person who checks a guest in serves them breakfast the next morning. Stijn described the philosophy behind it plainly: "A lot of people don't remember what you do or what you told someone at the check-in, but they remember the way they felt when they were at your place."  

As Aedes scales that concept to a 98-room property, the challenge isn't reinventing the idea. It's proving it holds at seven times the size. But as Stijn says: “That's exactly where technology can help hospitality. It can support and it can enable staff to have even more time to spend with guests and to interact and to really provide feelings and experiences.” 

Different bets, same belief 

What ties these three together isn't a shared playbook. It's the willingness to sit with the discomfort of doing something the market doesn't have a name for yet, and to keep adjusting once real guests push back.  

Mirco pointed to guest messaging as an ongoing fight, where WhatsApp response expectations are much faster than email ever was. Josef was blunt that B2B sales and loyalty points never worked for Limehome's model and were dropped rather than defended. Stijn admitted to shelving ideas that weren't ready, then revisiting them months later once the technology caught up. 

None of these hoteliers are chasing the same definition of hospitality. Mirco is blending F&B into the front office. Josef is removing the front office almost entirely. Stijn never had one to remove.  

But each has decided that the desk, the queue, and the routine of passport-and-credit-card check-in were never the point. What guests remember is how they felt, and that's worth rebuilding a lobby, a team, or an entire operating model around. 

Watch the full live Matt Talks episode