The Hybrid Hospitality Podcast will examine the trends that are transforming hospitality and explore what the future of the industry might look like.
In this episode, Rosie chats to Shaun Prime who was previously Chief Operating Officer and Chief Product Officer at Selina. We caught up with him a couple of weeks before he was appointed CEO of Remote Year, which Selina acquired in 2020.
Scroll down to read the transcript of this podcast episode…
Introduction: You are listening to The Hybrid Hospitality Podcast.
If you’re interested in the trends that are transforming hospitality and want to explore what the future of the industry might look like, then you’re in the right place. This podcast is brought to you by Stay the Night, a creative marketing agency, working with hospitality businesses around the world who are changing the way people stay, work and play.
In this episode, I’ll be speaking with Shaun Prime. Shaun was previously Chief Operating Officer and Chief Product Officer at Selina. We caught up with him a couple of weeks before he was appointed CEO of Remote Year, which Selina acquired in 2020. Shaun remains an Executive Committee Member and Strategic Advisor at Selina, alongside his new role and has a unique oversight of the trailblazing start-up’s growing portfolio.
In this episode, we find out all about Selina’s new subscription products, Selina CoLive and Nomad Passport, we learn how Remote Year will improve the customer experience at Selina and hear why Shaun thinks hybrid hospitality will be the future of their offering.
Hi Shaun, and welcome to The Hybrid Hospitality Podcast. It’s great to have you on. Before we dive in to all things Selina, I’d like to find out a little bit more about you. Can you tell me a little bit about your background in the industry and what led you to join in Selina?
I started out my life in the merchant navy, travelling the world as a deck officer and engineer so I always had that sort of blue sky thinking and the engineering mindset. The two roles I had prior to Selina – I was at a company called Unite Students, so we were a UK student operator… so I’ve always worked in some sort of housing or hospitality. I was in the Operations Director of the group. And then prior to this, I worked for a company called Native Places – an aparthotel brand in the UK. So again, hospitality-led, similar kind of target groups, but the big pull to joining Selina was that I just loved the idea of experiences leading hospitality… and also a real focus on the generation which is our target audience. So how those young people want to move, travel and experience the world. So, that’s my background and at Selina, I was the Chief Operating Officer for a couple of years. And then recently the Chief Product Officer looking after the IP of the company – what every location is, what experiences we offer – and so now I look after Remote Year which is a company that we recently joined forces with.
Obviously your role has a huge scope – but just in the day to day, can you tell me a little more for our listeners about your role?
Yeah so the Chief Product Officer role – the best way to think about that is overall the company defines itself on delivering experience for our target customer… and when we think about the target customer – the millennials, Gen-Z, the people that are moving throughout the world – the product role is to think about, continuously, what products are we selling and what is our product? So our product is the location, the pillars of accommodation, co-work, experiences, retail, community… and then also under my division is the technology. So we have one set looking at our physical product and then we have another set which is our technology… and when those two things come together, that allows us to start to really think about what the customer shift in mindset is. Are we relevant still? Are we delivering a technology experience that matches that relevancy? Our job really is to ensure that we remain relevant all the time and deliver products and services to the people that we target and serve.
That’s obviously been very interesting in the past 10 months because it’s changed so much – shifting towards everything from remote work to domestic travel.
So, you recently introduced two subscription products, Selina Co-Liv and the Nomad Passport. Could you tell me the key differences between the two products and what led to you bringing these to market?
I think for us that was a bit of a fast-forward moment. Ultimately, we built this brand really focused on digital nomads. That’s how it all started. So we envisioned a world of democracy for a start. As you know, in every Selina we have a dorm all the way up to a loft. It was much more about a mindset and an attitude as a brand than it was about being, you know, kind of a typical hotelier with one product aimed at one audience… and that’s really how the brand started. Over time obviously we’ve grown and the company now has more than a hundred – I think it’s about 105 of those hotels now – and we started to develop this thinking, probably about two years ago, to think about the real needs… and if we knew that the world of digital nomadism was kind of in its infancy, remote workers were a more small collective group and we wanted to ensure that we could be a place and a platform where people could permanently live that lifestyle. So that’s why we’ve got the things like the common kitchens, the libraries, the wellness centres, you know, a bigger product range to serve that customer.
As COVID started to take a hold, it really fast-forwarded our thinking and how we’d bring that product up in our priority list. That’s effectively when we said “okay, let’s start with two products”. So it’s aimed at everybody, you know, everybody that’s able to at some point take time away from where they live or work and to be able to then travel across the world… and the platform for us is always global and we continue to grow that footprint.
Then we built out two products. So the ones that you’re talking about today are the nomad passport – really that product is a bit more flexible. It allows you to be able to move more freely with a frequent number of locations of course, to be able to work easily. But the way to think about it is that it’s kind of a prepaid model. So if you’re somebody that isn’t able to remote work all the time, but you can go for two weeks, a month or three months a year, whatever that looks like we’re able to pass on to you a package that is reflective of the amount of time that you’re going to spend with us. So if a typical hotel night is, you know, a hundred dollars a night, then we’re going to be able to offer you a discount because if you’re staying for a prolonged period of time, you’re actually taking up the occupancy.
The design of that product was to say, prepaid, take what you need so that it’s entirely tailored to you… and you can then as soon as you’ve purchased that, use your app to go ahead and spend that prepaid wherever you want. The biggest benefit of course to that program is you’ve decided how much you want to spend. You can save over time by buying more and more of that… and then you can decide where to spend that in that… The second product that we have is what we call the Selena CoLive. This one is really where you work and live with the brand. One way to think about that is not paying rent and monthly rent to our co-lead model… and that allows you to travel into a country at a time or multiple locations as you want to. But the difference with that one is it’s a fixed monthly fee and that fee is different, whether it’s a dorm, whether it’s a micro, a standard or one of our suites or lofts. So two different products, one, I can decide how much and when, and the other one is, I want to shift my life more towards that remote.
Yeah, definitely. So Stay the Night is location independent, so we work remotely and it’s definitely something that – had we had the opportunity when we went backpacking for 12 months – to do something like that, it takes so much of the stress away from it of having to plan ahead.
So, Selina was one of the first brands to combine the hotel experience with coworking. You talked a little bit about mindsets and attitudes that of your customers. How do you think – as more brands adopt this hybrid model, because remote working has accelerated – how do Selina stay one step ahead?
Look, I think community can be probably a little bit overused but I would say that from day one we designed our business around this. To be able to offer every individual that comes into our product, that’s the right kind of age – our target average age is 30, so somewhere from 25 to 35 – our view of this is that it’s a community. We’ve learned a lot over the last two years about that. But more importantly, we step forward now in 2021 with a specific role in the business that’s literally thinking about all of our customers and the specific communities. From a product perspective, we’re already there – you know, we’ve got our democratic accommodation, we’ve got coworking, we’ve got social spaces that are for residents like the cinema, the common kitchen, our wellness centres and our libraries. They’re part of every single Selina, so they’re in the DNA of the brand already. The next step of that is to think that in this group, there are communities. If I’m a co-liver, there’s a different way that I want to experience that brand and I want to arrive knowing that there’s a community of people like me rather than feel like I’m inside a transient hotel. So how are we going to tackle that? A big part of that is through our technology, the development of our platform around communities, the way that we communicate and listen to that community and also – in the world of product – how we adapt our product to that community. As soon as we launched that program, we set up very specific listening teams that would engage with those new customers, hear what they’re saying about what they’re experiencing and for us to be able to adapt and think about that.
So, it’s been at the core of what we always do, which is to put the customer at that listening point because we can test which helps us build a product from data, but actually the continued data helps us create that experience. To full circle your question, I think our brand is really well positioned for that audience and the customer and target that we’ve got is already those people. I think we have seen other brands launch their versions of this. To move from a transient hotelier that can be largely, commodity-based like, you know, a whole lot of their business is coming from OTAs and group sales and things like that. It’s harder for them to shift their brand and that service and the design of that product to not simply just be ‘Oh, book a hotel room for a month’. They will learn of course and they will come there, but the number one difference for us is that we believe that that facilitates experience on location. Have you been to a Selina?
Yeah, we went to the Brighton one just as it opened – so literally a couple of days after it opened. And then I’ve been to Selina Porto and Lisbon when I was travelling around Portugal.
Okay. So great, really great locations, but there’s a sense of buzz around the people and the target that’s in those. The constant programming that we do from music to wellness, to arts, to education, it’s much more for us about what you get as an experience when you arrived there and what we’re programming and delivering versus just thinking about ourselves as a hotel operator, which is so alien to our language.
And I think you definitely feel that when you visit a Selena in my experience, obviously it was a little different with the Brighton site because – COVID (!) – so it was a little bit different, but they were doing such a great job of still giving that kind of Selena vibe, like, you know you are at Selena, that’s what I’d say.
So you spoke about communities there and that’s something we’re really pushing with our clients and through our own marketing, that the brands who’ve already built a community has really proved to be the most resilient over the last 10 months. It’s something that can be kind of missed, that listening to your customers. People tend to maybe build a guest persona, put it in a file, file it away and not really consult it.
So, can you tell me how you approach that listening and also how technology helps facilitate that?
Yeah, it’s a tough nut to crack that one, but so how do we go about that? I guess what makes us think a little bit differently is the way that we structure our business. So on one side, if you imagine that part of our, every building is the hotel, those are people that are coming to stay with us and we need to service their needs very specifically. But the other side of every cylinder is the destination and our role in that is to become the destination in that locale. We do that by bringing on experience boards, local people that help guide us what this town specifically needs. But also we do that through the way that we organise our business. So at the destination there is a head office team that supports all the way down throughout the chain at every single location.
Within that team we have indexes and measures if you like. So as Selena, we have something called our destination index and it’s a measure that we use for our brand, but also measure that every single regional manager had to country and general manager has. That destination index is split between visitors and now we have visitors that are guests, short-stay guests and we have visitors that are our longer stay guests, the subscription guests… and there are a number of measures within that, that we use to be able to understand whether we’re doing a good job and that’s through surveys, it’s through feedback loops, everything that you would expect… and then we have visitors, which are the local community that come and use us because if the local community don’t use us, we’re not a destination. Then finally, we have our connectors, which are our people.
So those three things make up a wheel. That wheel gives us a score in the middle for every location, by each segment and then by each individual piece.. and then we have one team called the voice of customer that sits as part of that makeup and that team have got a number of things to do. So one is to overall manage the destination index and the business to be able to indicate to the other teams like the product team, to the guest experience team, to the development teams, all the different teams within our business, that team handle all of the voice of the customer. So, what are they saying in reviews? What are they saying in blogs? What they saying in community sites like yours. Like what is the sentiment that’s coming back from us? So we take that sentiment and bring it back into the business and redefine the products and service… and on the other part of that, that team are also engaged in what we call close the loop. We have a listening device that listens when somebody has mentioned something to us by Instagram or Twitter or direct email, or something in the location, or that we can see a review, that’s come in from a guest that’s particularly like painful if something’s gone wrong, that team is centred on fixing that not only with the customer for a better experience, but to the rest of the business to hear, learn, listen, and change.
Yeah, that’s amazing. I think that’s really good that the idea of listening and putting that at the centre of what you do, we’re always saying to brands, you know, talk about yourself less on social media and talk about your customer more. It’s a hard message to get across because I think there’s a tendency to see marketing as broadcasting your sales information rather than seeing what goes on behind the scenes.
But speaking of behind the scenes – over the past 10 months, the ability to adapt quickly and take risks has been so important for brands. How does Selena create a work environment that encourages that innovation?
Hmm, that’s a good question. Before I answer, you just made me think about something and I think it’s important that brands are humble enough to also think about what they don’t get right. It just triggered something there earlier, but we now have a new role as well, which is community. And that role is really important to us because I think that what we’ve been traditionally good at in the past is that listening and bringing them back into the business, but I’m not sure we’ve always yet got right the ability to re-communicate back out to different communities, what we heard and what we changed. That was a big learning for us from last year, which was, well, how do we do that? So we now have that role – it actually doesn’t sit in our marketing team.
It’s a role that’s specifically to engage. Innovation, I mean that is tricky, I mean, as a business, we’re highly innovative. We have under my division, an R and D team and that’s part of our tech – the subscription came out of that and I don’t know if you’ve heard about, well, let’s talk about it as step up. So one was, how can we innovate to bring customers in and help them feel safe? So there’s the obvious things that everybody did, which was what are your COVID policies and safety requirements? How are you going to treat bookings and cancellations differently to provide comfort? Then we started to really think about that ongoing, not just COVID, but like what happens after this? Number 2, the world has changed. People are desperate to get out there. In their hearts they want to travel, want to move into different places of the world, learn local culture.
That’s why we built these subscription products. But I guess the other thing that we thought about as innovation that came from one of our team was, we’re a seasonal business. We have occupancies that fluctuate across the seasons in seasonal regions. And you know, if you’re looking at global cities like London, occupancy never really fluctuates. It’s great, but different seasons in different places mean that. One of the innovations was that we built something called the residency and the exchange. So if you’re a content provider and that could be a DJ, a yoga teacher, you could be an electrician that is out of work right now, or is on a break, whatever that looks like you’re able to come and apply to the Selena Residency. Tell us what your content provision is and then our residency team will work with your application.
If you’re accepted into the residency, you’re able to exchange your gift with accommodation. So for example, somebody that’s a freelancer or a DJ or a musician or an educationalist can come and say, you know, I want to travel for three months and this is what I can offer to your community. And that’s our guests. You know, I’m somebody that did a startup and I benefited and I can really help people understand that journey. And in return for them doing that, we give them free accommodation. So you exchange your gift for what we have, which is, some available rooms across the portfolio. Why do we do that? Because we think that’s another community that we serve have creatives that often find times like this really, really difficult. Even in times where freelancers have got work, it’s often sporadic because they’re choosing to live a different lifestyle.
So for us, it’s a new community that can use what we’ve got on offer and available to do those things. So I think innovation is – our leadership is a very flat structure, like we push innovation and new ideas and new thinking all the time from our hospitality operations group, from within our finance groups, from people that are acquiring the properties for us. I think that’s the one exciting part about Selena that nothing stands still – every day, if there’s an idea that is good, it can be taken up into a place where that voice can be heard quickly. If it’s a great idea, we’ll push it. You know, we’ll jump on that and help people to be able to do it.
Yeah. And it’s obviously working because Selena – at my last check – have raised over $360 million in investment. What do you think personally makes your model particularly attractive for investors?
There’s different parts of the model that make it attractive to our investors. Overall, I think what investors see with us is a company that’s five years old that really doesn’t pay for lots of marketing dollars to be spent. It delivers a great experience in incredible locations around the world where people talk about us really positively I guess the bottom line of that is that that word of mouth has driven real brand awareness for a start, but number two, we’re working with the right target audience. So if you think about the future of our business and hotels, we’re working with that right target audience and age group for us to be able to grow. I think the big trend of remote work and digital nomadism is, and the amount of companies today that are allowing that remote work and for us to be positioned well is great.
I also think we’ve proven out and demonstrated our ability to be able to take distressed assets – horrible mom and pop hotels, bring in the creatives, convert them to a great standard and provide experience and community at speed. The way that all of that gets structured in the background is ultimately the model of the business. So for me, it’s that we committed to deliver something, turned those commitments into actions and results. And off the back of that, finding investors that really love what we do. I think the investors that we have with us today is a gift for us because it’s part of our story and hugely supportive in what we do. So we’ll continue to do that.
Another trend that’s kind of grown at the moment and it was building a momentum before COVID, but it’s around sustainable, regenerative travel and we’re seeing more and more hospitality companies who are giving back to the community.
This is something that Selina has done for a long time so can you tell me some of the ways that Selena gives back?
First of all, sustainability is obviously a very big question and lots of companies have policies, but one of the things that I love about what we do is at the start of when we find a hotel, if that hotel is sort of in distress or old, but it’s full of that old nasty grandma furniture that you’ve seen times again. We take and recycle 80%+ of all of that furniture and that is using creatives and makers to do that work with us. As a goal, we don’t set out ‘buy new’ – in fact I can walk into Tulum and see a rug that we picked out of a rubbish pile or a crappy flea market around the corner and had it cleaned and is now a beautiful rug that sits back in the room.
So there’s many different sustainability measures – one is at the start of that. Number two this year, we have delivered a huge Internet of Things Project across our portfolio and the Internet of Things Project is a really smart way to monitor all of our electricity consumption and usage. It gives us great customer stuff. We know if the pump somewhere in a hotel in Mexico is running low and the shower pressure’s not good enough, but also these systems knock out lighting, they turn off AC’s when people aren’t in the room and we’ve forced ourselves into thinking about that. And of course, one of those advantages is not to waste any money but I think bigger than wasted money is wasting resources. That’s kind of at the key of that heart. The other thing I talk about as you’re probably talking about this, Selena gives back programs, impact programs.
This is a really kind of beautiful thing. Part of that big measure I talked to you about – that destination index – one of those measures is the impact that Selina Gives Back. As part of Selina Gives Back, one of the biggest programmes is the hospitality programme. So you know that we work in lots of remote places and we also work in towns that are very poor and often need a lot of help and one of the things that we do is we have a hospitality program. So, every location takes on hospitality interns that come from the local community and we train them in areas that they’re interested in. So that can be in front of house, it can be in operations, it can be in culinary, whatever that looks like – they come from all different walks of life and we have KPIs and goals, with percentages of those that come through the programme need to be in full-time employment in hospitality a year later. Our general managers are targeted on that – it’s one of the overall KPIs in the business.
The other impact stuff is that every employee gives up 3% of their work time towards a local community impact program. It’s a measure, it’s not something that’s optional – we have to do that. There’s many different ways that that happens – sometimes it’s engaging in a beach clean and keeping the area tidy. Other times, we’re building something inside the local community playgrounds. We are welcoming after school care and our facilities are allowed to be open for free of charge for the local community.
If I think about two examples that I really loved – just before we were grounded, I was in Selina Manuel Antonio and I arrived on a Saturday and we’ve got three swimming pools in that property. and the big pool was just full of kids and Selina staff teaching them to swim because they’d never swam. This programme now starts from them learning to swim to going with Manuel (who is the GM of that property) – he loves every day to run to the Bay that’s close by and there’s a big yellow buoy – I’ve swum that bay with him – where now the kids are learning to swim properly and he’s spearheaded that.
Then the second one is that we have another wonderful Selina on an Island in Panama called Red Frog. And again, I was there – in fact, I was holidaying there, taking some time off – and halfway through the day, there’s a load of Selina guests and it’s in the middle of the jungle on a beautiful island. There’s a beach and in come 20 kids and parents that just walk into the property, sit by the pool, start diving, having a great time for an hour and I asked the GM there, ‘I said, who are those guys?’ They said, ‘oh they’re the local community. They always come and swim.’
Our ability to do that doesn’t cost us much but actually it means that we are able to be a pillar within that community. We’re also very careful to overstep our mark because we’re not there to change anything, we are there to help in any way that we can.
It sounds like you really empower your employees and managers to take the lead on that in their specific destinations which is really good – to see what that community actually needs and then respond to that.
Further to that, having visited a few Selina sites myself, it’s clear that you have a great balance between standardisation and personalisation. Each site feels very unique, but you know that you’re in a Selina and so how do you achieve that balance through your programming and products?
That is the role of the product department. So you’ll know that every one of our locations is different but what is important is that when you come to a Selina, you know it’s us. The way that we do that is I can’t always fix the size of a room – you know, you go to some hotel operators and it will always look the same and it will always be that room. But what we do is, to fit our brand around lots of types of style of hotel, we apply what we will call parameters.
So as an example, maybe our standard room is from 18 to 22 square meters, and that room will always have the same things in it. So you’re always going to have the two bedside tables, you’re always going to have a desk you’re always going to have the sound system. There’s everything that in the room, it’s the same.
However, every Selina starts with a concept and the concept is driven from the experience director and the local experience board, the locals that tell us, this is what would be cool around here, and we work with them. That concept could be as extreme as the black building and everything is black for some reason and that’s what we’re going to do and it’s going to have yellow lights.
Whatever the concept is, that becomes what the designers design against and look and feel is really important in a Selina. Then what we do is give guidelines, so one of our guidelines is as stupid as, when I entered the main programming space, I need to feel really comfortable that as a backpacker, I can throw my backpack on the floor and walk around in my flip flops and it’s fine. But then it’s also comfortable enough for somebody that’s an entrepreneur of a young business, earning really good money that wants to feel the vibe that feels comfortable to them and their needs. So we try to standardise what’s important for people to recognise about the brand.
Then we try to standardise the things that people need for them to have a great experience and then we let the designers go to work. think that’s one of the most fun things about working for a brand like this is – you know, when I walk into Brighton, which is cool, Latin and fun on the front versus the Secret Garden in Lisbon, which is a bit more moody with the secret swimming pool…
When you see what the designers do, it always makes it feel fresh and like, I want to go to the next one to see what that one’s all about. So consistency is really important. I’m going to tell you, we had to work very hard at that because a couple of years ago we weren’t consistent, so that’s the job for us to get right.
That’s interesting you say about the learning curve there. My next question was going to be going back to yourself, so what are the biggest lessons that you’ve learned over the past 10 months during the course of the pandemic that you’ll take forward?
What are the biggest learnings? I guess they kind of fall in a few areas. One of my big learnings is that as a brand, you need to be totally engaged with your customer and you need to spend time investing in those people, listening, communicating and building loyalty because once you have that relationship, they become your biggest advocates and also your biggest way out of a crisis. So for them to feel part of us and for us to have an impact on their lives, I think the work that we have to continue is to get better and better at that. I’d say that the other thing that is a huge learning for me is to probably to have a broader and longer roadmap of thinking and to make it more agile, because none of us would ever expect that this would happen in our lifetimes, right.
It’s up to me to be humble enough to think that, ‘oh, the world can change’. I think what that means is that you need to build agility into how you operate and to be able to think about what those roadmaps mean. Of course, if we’ve had one pandemic in the way that it seems to be playing out, it doesn’t mean there won’t be another, and it does feel like this one’s here to stay a while. So I think for us to have stronger forward planning.
The third one is that – I’ll be very honest with you – we learned a lot about our business. We learned a lot about at a time where a crisis is and your revenue turns off overnight, and you’ve got to take some very tough decisions. You sort of think about, well, what did we need in the first place and did we just evolve into what we were? So, to be much more disciplined about that, because we want to be here for the next hundred years so it’s really important for us to be able to say, how do we now build a business that’s flexible enough? That’s right for people? That’s right for our customers? and also that stands the test of time. I’m really proud of how we’ve managed to be able to do that in the best way possible, but also to be able to survive something.
If there’s a final one, I think overall it’s to realise that if you have not only great relationships with your guests, if you’ve got a great relationship with your people in a time of crisis, they will pull together for you like you wouldn’t believe. So to invest in that more and more and more of that culture and that commitment to those people, even though it can be very difficult in times of crisis, that’s when you really feel that you’ve got a family. So those feel like the big things that I’ve learned.
No, I can totally relate to that with our business. It’s kind of been a time to step back and think, can we be more intentional? Because you get to a point where a business starts to grow almost on its own and you’re like holding the reins of this. It’s been a period of reflection for everybody. But you talked about wanting to be around in a hundred years – scaling that back a little bit, what do you think if we were to fast forward five years, for example, what do you think the hospitality landscape will look like? Or what do you think will be different?
It’s a great question. I feel like this sounds like a really silly kind of message, but our mission is key. Wherever we feel we can offer an experience in whatever corner of the world that is, we want to be there and we want to be there in the most authentic way possible. Our biggest challenge as a brand is to maintain authenticity and that is our commitment – that when you go there, you don’t feel like you’re in a big brand. In fact, the dream that we have is that the Selina is no longer written above the door. It’s just this destination, this community and that you have people saying, ‘oh, oh, that’s the Selina guys that do that’.
So in five years time, I would like to think that we’re – we already delivered 17 new locations inside this pandemic – and I think that we want to get to our target of those 500 properties around the world as our first win. From our perspective as leadership, we haven’t won yet until we get to that first milestone. In terms of the landscape, I think the landscape has a very challenging 12 months to 24 months, probably even 36 ahead and I think people will start to adapt to this hybrid model. We know that we have eyes on us and we can see other people are now trying to flip their model more towards what we’re doing. You know, those that win will be centred around experience so I think the landscape change will be that if we’re going to win that, hybrid hospitality will be our future. So, places and products that allow you to take what you need and who knows, maybe that product in the future is a small apartment instead of hotel room, things will change, but I think the customer is going to demand much more flexibility.
They’re going to demand experience, and they’re going to want to have this hybrid model around the world. And I think I’m talking about our target demographic – for others, their key messaging is different to ours in terms of how they’re going to recover. But, I think the hospitality landscape is just going to feel much more integrated as a system and a platform that is just broken down into hotels, coworking, food and beverage like different spaces. But I have to say I’m really excited by it and I think for me, if anything out this pandemic is positive for me, it’s the fact that our sort of mission has been brought forward and I think that the group of customers and the target customer that we want to serve are probably the first people that will start traveling again, because they feel a bit more resilient and plus they have desperate need to, and now their jobs are going to allow them to do it. I think that’s it. It’s going to be much more a ‘live and stay’ kind of vibe versus just ‘I’m hopping off on holiday.’
Yeah, it definitely is exciting. When you said hybrid hospitality is the future, I’m like, that’s the sound bite! So in the shorter term, what’s in store for Selena in 2021?
First of all, 2021 is challenging. Very. We’re going to have to continue to react to the ups and downs of the pandemic. I think we’re feeling positive but cautious about the vaccine. I think that we’re fortunate actually because our food and beverage and local community space is a part of our brand and so those will probably fire up first if we’re allowed to, and then the travel will start to come in. But ,we’re very focused this year on the technology products, you know, the residency, the exchange, our new app experience, Remote Year as a new business that we’ve acquired. Those feel to us like getting those things embedded into our platform properly and working for the customer really well, is our best bet really now to improve our overall experience.
Then of course, we still have goals on the new openings this year. Hopefully we’ll enter two new countries this year. I can’t tell you just yet – I don’t know if I’m allowed – but two new countries in Europe this year that are very exciting and we’ve already secured the partnerships that we need to be able to do that. Then we need to be really focused on making sure that those products that we delivered are ready, and we’re going to push, push, push. You know, we have a new team now that’s just focused on the subscription model and really working with those customers to get them up and traveling again, the safest way possible is the aim for us.
Yeah, that sounds great. And so finally, on the note of looking forward, where is the first place you’ll be traveling to when normality resumes and we can leave our homes?
Ooh, that’s a good one. So Remote Year is actually putting on its first freedom retreat. We feel as though that so many people right now, as soon as they’re able to, would just love to go somewhere, remote, beautiful, connect with people and, you know, revive and thrive again and get that feeling. So we’re putting on a retreat and we’re hoping that that’s in March and that will be the first place that I go to. The second place will have to be to Israel because I miss the teams in Tel Aviv so I’ve got to get there.
Oh, I was meant to go to Israel last year for the first time last year. I’ve been dying to go for so long!
Wow. Well, you have to come. We’ve just opened two properties in Israel – one in Tel Aviv and one in the Calman Mountains. They’re insane. Israel is for me, one of the most incredible, beautiful places. So yeah, make sure you get there.
At some point, hopefully sooner rather than later! So, thank you so much for your insights and for taking the time to speak with us today. I’m really excited to hear about those top secret new openings and to visit a few more Selina’s myself. So thank you.
Thank you very much for having us. It’s been a pleasure.
For those listening who want to find out more about Selina, you can visit their website here.
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Header image copyright: Selina.
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