Niels and Thijs van der Valk of Baoase on Family Hospitality, the Art of Saying Yes, and Building the Caribbean's Number One Resort

There is a hotel in Curaçao that started as a father's love letter to an island. Ad van der Valk - fourth-generation hotelier and patriarch of one of the Netherlands' largest hotel families - arrived in Curaçao in 1989 to open a Van der Valk property, fell in love with the place, and eventually bought a piece of land in a quiet neighborhood where he planned to build five villas for his five children. Within a year, the children were away at university and never visiting. So he turned it into a hotel. His sons Niels and Thijs, numbers four and five respectively, are now the co-directors. The property is Baoase Luxury Resort - the number one resort in the Caribbean by both Travel + Leisure and Condé Nast Traveler in 2025, and the number one hotel in Curaçao by U.S. News & World Report in 2026.

Niels and Thijs van der Valk sat down with Adam Mogelonsky to tell that story in full and to explain why a property built around the philosophy of welcome home has become one of the most awarded boutique resorts on earth. The conversation covers the origin of the Baoase name, the Indonesian design language that shaped the property's identity, the Viva la Gastronomie events that brought Michelin-starred chefs to Curaçao to train local staff, the purple flag system that signals when a guest wants to be left alone, the divers who emerged from the ocean carrying magnum bottles of red wine at a private beach party, the expansion currently under construction, the branded residences project at Casa Coma, and a closing vision of a second Baoase somewhere in the world.

What is Baoase, and what does the name mean?

Baoase is a 23-accommodation luxury resort on the waterfront of Curaçao, operating at approximately 75 guests at full capacity; deliberately, fiercely boutique. It sits in a quiet residential neighborhood where you would not expect to find a hotel, which is precisely the point. The experience from the moment you pass through the gate is designed to feel like arriving home; not at a hotel, not at a resort, but at a place where you are known and where the people who greet you mean it.

The name carries the story of the whole thing. B is for Bibi, Ad van der Valk's partner, for whom he first built a lagoon on the property and then an island, which he named Bibi Island in her honor. A is for Ad. And oase is oasis in Dutch. "Put the names together and you get Baoase," Niels and Thijs explain. The pronunciation defeated early American guests entirely - reservations staff fielded every possible variation before settling on the fact that guests mispronouncing the name and never forgetting it was more valuable than a name they could say correctly and forget immediately. The name stayed.

From five villas to the Caribbean's best resort

The founding sequence has the quality of a family legend told so many times it has found its essential shape. Ad van der Valk first came to Curaçao in 1989 to open a Van der Valk hotel, the Dutch chain that the family has operated for four generations. He stayed because he fell in love with the island. In 2002, he bought a house in a small neighborhood intending to build a family retreat: five villas in a U-shape around a single pool, one for each of his children. Within a year, none of them were visiting - they were at university, in school, getting on with their lives. "He said: I'm going to change it into a hotel and you're going to lose your villa," Niels and Thijs recall. "We think it was on purpose."

The property grew slowly from there - buying the neighbors, then the neighbors of the neighbors, then building phase by phase. The version of Baoase that Niels and Thijs consider the real beginning of what the resort is today came in 2016, with the construction of the beachfront pool suites that defined the property's identity. Between 2002 and 2016 was, in their words, the time of finding out what Baoase should be.

Their sister Jessie and her husband Oliver arrived in the middle of COVID in 2020 and spent approximately six years building the operational and commercial infrastructure (the five-star systems, the guest experience frameworks, the team culture) that allowed Baoase to compete at the level that the awards now confirm. Niels and Thijs took over the co-director roles as that foundation was in place.

The father remains present. He walks the property, talks to every guest, and when they ask who he is, he makes the same joke he has made for 20 years: "I'm the biggest employee." "It's also a connection," Niels and Thijs say. "If you come to a place where you meet the owner, it gives something extra." He also keeps everyone sharp. He lives on the property for extended periods, observes everything, and offers the kind of quiet corrections that only someone who built the place from the ground up knows to make.

The design: Indonesian warmth in the Caribbean

The visual language of Baoase is Indonesian - warm woods, lush tropical planting, thatched structures, lagoon water the color of shallow sea glass, and an overall feeling of a private world enclosed within the neighborhood around it. The choice was not incidental. It reflects a deliberate decision to create something that feels rooted and specific rather than generically Caribbean, a design identity that is immediately recognizable and impossible to replicate by committee.

Every element of construction and renovation is done in house. Ten minutes before the interview, Thijs was on the construction site in old clothes, guiding the team to ensure that the placement of every element in the expansion was exactly right. "We do everything in house," Niels and Thijs say. "That's also a USP of ours." The consequence is that the property knows things that an external contractor never could: which wood to use and which to avoid given the salt in the air, which adhesives hold up in the humidity, which fridges can withstand the oxidation that comes from proximity to the ocean. "Even the fridge in the side kitchen can corrode with rust because of the salt in the air," they explain. "It goes quite far."

The design philosophy resists trend. When a particular marble was in vogue across the industry, Baoase did not follow it. "Marble is marble, in 30 years it's still beautiful. But we do our own thing." The expansion now underway has produced a new oceanfront pool suite that takes everything learned from the beachfront suites built in 2016 and applies a decade of refinement: the same foundation, but with updated technology embedded invisibly in the infrastructure rather than on the surfaces, a shower experience redesigned as a genuine event, and proportions - 80 to 90 square meters, more than five meters wide - that make the room feel like a private world.

The guest experience: welcome home

The number that Niels and Thijs mention most readily when asked about loyalty is not a statistic about award placements. It is the guests who have returned more than 20 or 30 times. "Then you're doing something well, I think," they say.

The loyalty at Baoase is not built on points or discounts. It is built on recognition and the accumulation of knowledge about a guest that allows the team to anticipate rather than react. "It starts when the guest comes back," Niels and Thijs say. "Because then you can really anticipate on what they want." The chef who walks to the table of a returning guest, puts the menu aside, and asks what they actually feel like eating this time, even if the ingredient is not in the house and needs to be flown in, is the mechanism by which that loyalty deepens. Staff who have been with the property for five or ten years carry those relationships. They know the guests. The guests come back for them as much as for the place.

The majority of the team is from Curaçao - a deliberate choice that reflects something real about the warmth of the island's hospitality culture. "If they talk to you, they're smiling," Niels and Thijs say. "They have a kind of flair. A lot of sense of humor." That flair, the informal, genuinely affectionate quality of how the team interacts with guests, is described as something that cannot be bought or trained into existence. It comes from people who are proud of where they are from and what they do.

The purple flag and the art of saying yes

Baoase has a purple flag system. Guests who want to be left alone - undisturbed at their villa, at their pool, on the beach - put out the flag. The team reads it and gives them space. It is a small, specific solution to a problem that larger resorts typically do not even recognize as a problem: that being approached by attentive staff, however warm, is sometimes exactly what a guest does not want. The flag makes the guest's preference visible without any conversation being required.

The same instinct, reading what the guest needs rather than delivering a prescribed welcome, runs through every element of how the resort operates. There is no situation in which Niels and Thijs say no to a guest request. There is only finding out what is possible and making it happen.

The most vivid example in the conversation is a private beach gathering during which the host wanted to serve magnum bottles of red wine to the assembled group in a way that would create an unforgettable moment. The wine was there, the beach was set, the decorations were beautiful but there was no wine yet when the host gave his toast. At that moment, three divers emerged from the ocean carrying the magnums, surfacing in a line to pour for the guests. "We do a lot of honeymooners, and people propose here a lot," Niels and Thijs say. "A small fishing boat came in - 'Hey, I'm lost, I'm looking for that person on the beach' - and then he gave a shell, and in the shell was the ring." The improvisation is the product of a team that has internalized the question: what would make this moment unforgettable?

Culinary: Michelin stars in the kitchen, local fishers in the supply chain

The culinary story at Baoase is one of the more instructive in the conversation because it begins with an admission that contradicts the obvious assumption. You would expect a beachfront resort in the Caribbean to be built around fresh local seafood. "You might think to be honest that we are in front of the ocean," Niels and Thijs say. "But it's very difficult." The local fishing supply is inconsistent, and Baoase's guests expect consistency. Local fish is used when it is available and of the right quality but the foundation of the culinary program is built on imported product that can be relied upon.

The innovation that addressed this and transformed the culinary program into one of the resort's most celebrated features was the Viva la Gastronomie series: events bringing Michelin-starred chefs from the Netherlands, Belgium, and Mexico to Baoase's kitchen for one to three nights, cooking alongside the local team. One evening brought together enough accumulated Michelin stars between visiting chefs and the Baoase team that Niels and Thijs count six or seven stars working in a single kitchen. De Librije - the three-Michelin-starred restaurant based in Zwolle, and the Netherlands' most decorated culinary institution - was among the participants.

The purpose of the series was not primarily the guest experience, though that was exceptional. It was the training of the local team. "They can work with a two Michelin star chef," Niels and Thijs say. "They are coming from an island. Curaçao is not the wealthiest island, and they learn on the job. One part of training is to let them work with such good chefs. They learn so much." The result is a kitchen that consistently delivers at a level that the resort's reviews and awards confirm and that does so with a team the resort grew itself.

René Klop served as executive chef and F&B director at Baoase for approximately 13 years, providing the continuity that allowed the culinary program to develop with the same long-term consistency as everything else at the property.

Managing without a low season

Baoase has a problem that most hotels would welcome: it essentially has no meaningful low season. Curaçao sits outside the hurricane belt, which gives it a year-round climate advantage over most of the Caribbean. The repeat guest rate is extraordinarily high. The waiting list for rooms is real.

The management challenge this creates is significant. Occupancy is high enough that maintenance windows are narrow, expansion projects are difficult to run alongside full operations, and the team needs rest that a relentless high season does not naturally provide. The answer Niels and Thijs have landed on is both operational and philosophical: operate at six working days per week rather than seven, hire people who genuinely love the work rather than those who are there purely for the income, and occasionally, when a specific room needs time, instruct the sales team to pull back the brakes. "We prefer quality over quantity in that moment," they say.

The expansion now underway allows a different solution: as new rooms come online, the existing rooms can be taken offline for deep maintenance without sacrificing overall revenue. The phasing is deliberate: 14 new oceanfront pool suites in the first phase, followed by a final phase of eight additional suites, at which point the property will have reached the ceiling it has always operated toward: a maximum of approximately 100 guests.

What comes next: Casa Coma, the spa, and a second Baoase

Three strands of development run alongside the room expansion.

The first is a significant spa and wellness addition - not a small treatment room elevated by marketing language, but a full hammam, sauna, treatment facilities, cold plunge, and gym expansion. "It's not gonna be a small wellness," Niels and Thijs say. The decision reflects where the market is going and where Baoase already positions itself: as a place for recovery, recharging, and genuine rest. A spa of this caliber is the natural complement to that positioning.

The second is Casa Coma - a branded residences project currently in development, with six-bedroom villas of approximately 3,500 to 7,000 square feet, sold and then managed by Baoase on behalf of their owners. The buyers of these properties, Niels and Thijs report, are specifically attracted by the fact that Baoase's team - people who grew up in hotels, who think naturally about where the glasses should be, how to organize logistics invisibly, how to give residents access to Bibi Island without compromising anyone's privacy - is doing the design and management. "We bring the hotel features into a house," they say. "We utilize the spaces so well that everything is thought of."

The third, and the most significant in terms of what it says about where the brand is heading, is a second Baoase - somewhere in the world, location not yet determined. The brand is undergoing a full rebranding exercise to ensure the Baoase story is clear and portable enough to translate to a second location. "The world deserves a second Baoase," Niels and Thijs say. "We don't know yet where it is, but everything needs to be lined up. You cannot buy this. You need to treat it. And you need to have the time."

Curaçao: the hidden gem at the edge of the Dutch Caribbean

Curaçao has historically attracted a heavily Dutch tourism base - a natural consequence of its history as a Dutch colony and its current status as an autonomous country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, with five to six daily flights from the Netherlands. That is changing. The refinery and offshore industries that once anchored the island's economy have contracted significantly, accelerating a deliberate shift toward tourism. The American market is discovering Curaçao, typically through Aruba, which is better known, and then through the realization that its neighbor is both comparable in quality and less crowded. South American markets, particularly Brazil and Colombia, are growing. Direct flights from Atlanta and Toronto have broadened the accessible source market further.

Niels and Thijs project that within five years, the tourism mix will split approximately 40% Dutch, 30% American, and 30% South American and other. For Baoase specifically, the US market skews toward the tri-state area and Florida. Canadians, as Mogelonsky notes with some pride given his own Toronto base, are reliably present.

What makes Curaçao work as a destination for the kind of guest Baoase attracts - high-value, experience-driven, returning - is a combination of factors that compound: the year-round climate, the extraordinary clarity of the water, the Balinese resort experience that Baoase has created, and the island's specific cultural warmth. "They have a flair," Niels and Thijs say of the Curaçao people. "And that you can't buy."