Remco Gerritsen of CityHub on Solo Travel, Revenue per Square Meter, and Scaling a Modular Urban Hotel Across Europe
CityHub CEO Remco Gerritsen outlines plans to double hub capacity by end of 2025, covering space economics, modular builds in repurposed buildings, direct booking strategy, and solo traveler growth.
Almost half of CityHub's guests now travel alone, and nearly half of those are women, yet the founders never designed the concept for solo travelers. What they built instead was a private sleeping unit, a protected corridor open only to wristband holders, a social lounge with a full service bar, and a host on duty around the clock. Solo guests found it on their own, and the share has grown from roughly 29 percent in 2019 to nearly 50 percent today.
Remco Gerritsen of CityHub on Solo Travel, Revenue per Square Meter, and Scaling a Modular Urban Hotel Across Europe
Brand InsidersRemco Gerritsen of CityHub on Solo Travel, Revenue per Square Meter, and Scaling a Modular Urban Hotel Across Europe
Brand InsidersRemco Gerritsen, who became CEO of CityHub in August after a career of hotel operations and ownership work across Europe, Asia, and Russia, sat down with Adam Mogelonsky to explain how a brand with four hotels in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Reykjavik, and Copenhagen plans to double its capacity by the end of next year. He covers the economics behind the model, with two and a half hubs fitting into the footprint of one conventional room, the modular construction system that turns old garages and factories into hotels, the case for direct booking without OTAs, and what it takes to bring a veteran's discipline to a young and ambitious team. He also hints at a new city that CityHub hopes to announce very soon.
From collecting glasses to scaling a startup
Gerritsen describes himself as a hospitality professional since the age of eight, when he started picking up empty glasses and trays. From there he moved to KLM and then into hotels, where he has worked at every level from general manager to cluster to corporate, on both the operational and the owner side, mainly in Europe, Asia, and Russia. For the past seven years he has run his own company, supporting private owner groups with portfolio growth and management.
In that role he met the main shareholder of CityHub, who asked him to help bring the brand from startup to scale-up. He joined as CEO in August. "It is really, really nice to be in a very young and excited team," he says.
What CityHub is
CityHub was founded more than a decade ago by two students who wanted to change hospitality completely. "They thought about how can we redefine hospitality in a way for the new urban traveler, and there CityHub was born," Gerritsen says. The brand now has four hotels, in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Reykjavik, and Copenhagen, and is preparing a pipeline for the near future.
The concept gives each guest a private place to sleep, called a hub, and shares the rest. There is a hangout with a bar, high-end bathroom facilities, a location close to the city center and public transport, and a team of city hosts who can tell guests what is happening in the neighborhood. CityHub guests, he notes, "are not really particular tourists. They like to adapt the city in a different way."
Design: two L-shapes, one technology-led journey
The core of the concept is the hub itself, which Gerritsen describes as two L-shaped units stacked on each other, so that guests can stand upright at the entrance and then sleep on the upper or lower level. Each hub measures about eight square meters and includes a bed, space for luggage, and a mirror. "You have all the basic elements in your hub," he says. "The rest you share."
The journey is technology based. Guests check in and book themselves, collect a wristband at a kiosk, and use it to open their hub. A full service, self-service bar operates in the hangout, and the one personal touch point is the city host, who is present 24 hours a day and reachable through the CityHub app. The app also controls lighting in the hub, from red to yellow to disco, and offers Bluetooth music streaming.
The founders, Gerritsen says, understood something important early on. "They thought about how can we make so much digital, but use exactly the right touch points for a human touch." Ten years ago that was revolutionary. Today, he acknowledges, checking in on a phone or kiosk is common, but the whole CityHub journey is built around knowing where the human touch matters.
The rise of the solo traveler
Adam asks about solo travel, one of the largest global trends in the industry. Gerritsen says CityHub never targeted a single group. "In 2019, we had around 29 percent solo travelers, but in 2026, we are nearly 50 percent of our guests are solo travelers. And from the 50 percent, nearly 50 percent again is also women solo travelers. That was never the intention of the concept."
What explains it, in his view, is a combination of privacy, security, and the option to socialize. "If you solo travel, it's not always that you want to be alone. You go to a place and there you want to meet new friends, new ideas." Since the pandemic, many guests combine leisure with work. They might spend one or two weeks in Copenhagen, work from the hangout, meet other guests, and then explore the city together.
Female guests in particular appreciate the bathrooms, which are well equipped, with hair dryers and other amenities free of charge. The two newest hotels also have saunas and hot tubs, and small gyms are planned so that guests staying for two or three days can keep up their workouts. Gerritsen suspects CityHub's strong social media presence also plays a role, since solo travelers follow the brand on TikTok and then book the hotels.
The hangout: lobby, restaurant, and living room in one
The average length of stay is two to three days, depending on the location. Gerritsen compares the CityHub layout with a traditional hotel. "We have our hub, that's our room. We have then the bathroom facilities and then our hangout is the lobby and the restaurant in one." Guests take their own drinks, sit quietly, or work on laptops. In Copenhagen there is a theater that hosts movie nights, and the hotels run cocktail evenings. Everything is free and nothing is forced.
Sometimes a cocktail evening leads to a plan. "People say, let's go tomorrow explore together, and then they go their own way again." The average guest age is also rising. "When we started, it was only youngsters, and now there are also a lot of people for my age," Gerritsen says, joking that he is called the dinosaur in his company.
His summary of the guest is simple. "You don't use the place as a hotel. You use the place because you want to be part of the city. You are close to all the good connections, you want to connect to other people, but if you want, you can also have your own privacy in a secure environment."
Safety by design
Adam raises the physical and the perceived aspects of safety, particularly for solo women. Gerritsen says the answer is built into the layout rather than added to it. After check-in, guests receive a wristband that gives access to a protected area behind a barrier. "Behind this area, you have only people with wristbands. So this is a protected area from nature."
In the morning, guests walk to the bathrooms in their pajamas, as at a campsite, and everyone knows that only fellow guests can be there. "This is a natural barrier of security, what people love, and then everyone has their own private hub as well." The app adds a direct line to the city host, so a guest who hears a noise can report it and get a response. Compared with a hostel, where many people share one room, guests describe CityHub as a far safer and more private option.
Adam notes that the word hostel has carried a poor connotation for decades, and that CityHub is something else entirely. Gerritsen agrees and points to the guest reviews, which average 9.6 on Booking.com, a score he credits to the city hosts.
Direct distribution without OTAs
CityHub has invested heavily in its own website and app, and in influencers of different kinds, from journalists writing about a city to young creators with a very different voice. The rule is that each partner must match the target audience. "If it is a guest who wants to go to the five big events or museums of that city, it's not a CityHub guest."
The results are visible in Amsterdam, which has operated for more than a decade. "We have more than 50 percent of our guests booked direct. We don't have OTAs. They all book direct over our own website." Gerritsen says the cost pressure in the industry, from tourist taxes and commissions, makes this discipline essential. "We need to be smart and lean and mean at the same time."
Revenue per square meter
The economic thesis rests on a simple calculation. "You can build two and a half hubs on the square meter of a normal room. That means you have five times the revenue of a normal hotel room." CityHub then plays with rate and occupancy, targeting yearly occupancy above 90 percent, because its costs are comparatively low.
That combination makes the model profitable and allows CityHub to pay a somewhat higher rent per square meter than a traditional hotel. Landlords sometimes need an explanation, Gerritsen says, but spread across all the hubs the deal works better for CityHub. So far, he adds, the model has delivered.
A LEGO set for old buildings
The L-shaped units are manufactured in Germany and assembled on site. "It is one LEGO set that we build up on location," Gerritsen says. The ideal space has a net ceiling height of at least 2.70 meters and, preferably, one or two floors. That makes old garages and factories good candidates, and monuments are acceptable too, because the hubs are built into the existing structure with little work on the building itself.
This approach helps developers redevelop properties that are hard to reuse otherwise. The first German project is in Hamburg, where CityHub is converting an existing hotel. "We are building a CityHub in a monument, which is a hotel," Gerritsen says.
Pipeline: from Hamburg and Berlin to the south of Europe
After a delay in pipeline development following the pandemic, like many startups, CityHub now has Hamburg and Berlin signed. "And we hope, I just told you before, that we can announce very soon another very exciting city," Gerritsen says. The goal is to double capacity by the end of next year, with three hotels opening next year, and then to add one to three hotels per year from 2029.
He is convinced owners will follow. Many were waiting to see whether the concept worked, and one concern has been that a hotel owner whose operator leaves still has a hotel, while a CityHub owner would have hubs that others cannot easily run. "But we are now already more than a decade on the market. We are growing. We have a good financial base. We will go from a startup to a scale-up." The focus markets are Germany, Scandinavia, and the UK and Ireland, followed by southern Europe, where building regulations and the approach to restructuring old buildings are different.
Leading a young team as the dinosaur
Adam asks what it is like to steer a young organization whose members have little traditional hotel experience. Gerritsen laughs. "They don't like that I use the word dinosaur, but I love it, because I learn a lot from them, and I hope they see that they can learn a lot from me."
The founders, he says, had no hospitality background, and that was an advantage. They looked at technology first and then added human touch points. The team now looks for possibilities, not boundaries, and his role is to ask whether each good idea works in five, ten, twenty, or forty hotels. Next year the company opens three hotels, and nobody on the team has opened one before. "I'm the only one with 25 hotel openings. I said, that's enough. My experience is enough if we do it together."
Sustainability: reuse as the strongest lever
CityHub's carbon footprint per square meter is significantly lower than that of a conventional hotel, and Gerritsen attributes this mainly to the decision never to do a new build. "Nobody is demolishing an existing building. Most of the buildings are concrete or stone, and that is a huge part of that." About 95 percent of the materials for the hubs come from Europe, which keeps the supply chain short. CityHub is also a B Corp.
The company does not market this to guests, however, because it wants to avoid any hint of greenwashing. "We know what we're doing, and we believe that people want to be part of us and understand what we do." The sustainability story is used mainly with owners, who value a partner that helps them reduce the cost of building or rebuilding an existing property. Gerritsen adds that the approach is ideal for this type of concept, though not for every brand.
What comes next
Closing the conversation, Gerritsen returns to growth. CityHub will double its number of hubs, and the new locations meet the regulations and certifications required at the highest European standards. He distinguishes CityHub from the pod hotel category, where concepts vary widely. "We really want to go into the hub area. We are more hotel, and we also want to be on a certain quality."
That means adding services in the CityHub style, including small gyms and different spa facilities, and the recently introduced Twin Hub, which offers two beds instead of one. "Step by step we will develop our chain in combination with the requirements of our guests." He hopes to return in a year with news of the new openings.