Hotels as Drivers of Community Value – Challenges and strategies
Summary
This panel discussion at ITB Berlin, moderated by Jan Huizing (Hotelschool The Hague), brings together four practitioners and researchers to debate whether and how hotels can generate genuine community value — beyond mere tolerance. The conversation spans academic research on resident support for tourism, entrepreneurial experiments in monetizing hotel ground floors, and the structural tensions between financial returns and social impact.
Danik Nijland (HZ University / Centre of Expertise Leisure, Tourism & Hospitality) opens with a sobering data point: resident support for tourism is declining across destinations as negative impacts grow more visible. In the southwest Netherlands, only 20% of residents feel tourism strengthens social connection between neighbours — a figure she calls a major missed opportunity. She argues that raising awareness of tourism's positive contributions (especially economic vitality in small villages) is not in conflict with addressing negatives; residents who perceive more positive impacts are more willing to accept some nuisance.
A live policy debate erupts when Dimitris Manikis (Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, President EMEA) challenges Amsterdam's recent tourism tax increase to 12.5% (approximately 21% total with VAT), predicting tourism businesses will go bankrupt within two years and residents will regret the decision. The panel notes this is the central issue in upcoming Dutch municipal elections.
David Turnbull (Denizen) describes his prototype: a hotel lobby without rooms, 450+ sqm in Kreuzberg, Berlin (Copernicstrasse), offering shower and changing facilities, a wellness studio, event space, workspace, and a deli — all priced to reflect neighbourhood norms. His methodology involved speaking to 2,000 neighbours, distilling their needs to two problems: loneliness and errand paralysis. The most-used amenity installed was a DHL parcel station. He argues that the design failure of most hotels is 100+ years of bias toward check-in/check-out flow, and that monetising ground floors requires engaging non-hotel user-experience architects.
In a separate scaling story, Turnbull reveals that the largest commercial real estate fund in Germany — owning 200 hotels — approached Denizen to solve empty lobbies (9am–6pm). The resulting pilot grew into a network of 1,000 hotels, cafes, co-working spaces and gyms across Europe, inspired by the Urban Sports Club / ClassPass network model. Three in five Berlin startups have never leased office space and represent an untapped demand for productive hotel ground floors.
Thomas van Leeuwen (Hotels for Locals / D/DOCK) reports that 71 hotels in Amsterdam and recently Rotterdam have joined the Hotels for Locals platform, with Berlin and Bruges expansions imminent. He observes that the key industry shift is from RevPAR (revenue per available room) to RevPAM (revenue per available metre), which makes his platform easier to sell. He frames hotel–community integration as part of a broader 'blending' movement — pointing out the absurdity that most hotels are deserted by 11am on Sundays despite full running costs. His own office building in Amsterdam (€300,000/year rent) now generates €100,000/year profit by renting to event organisers — a model he directly applies to hotels.
Manikis provides the capitalist counterpoint: Wyndham operates 9,000 hotels in 101 countries, 95% franchised, and his mandate is returns for shareholders and pension funds. He asserts that hospitality's structural challenge is AI displacement of staff, scalability of boutique concepts, and private equity ownership demanding financial metrics above all. He is nonetheless openly interested in copying successful community-value concepts: 'I'm going to take some of your ideas and put it in some of our hotels.'
The panel converges on a key thesis: social return and financial return are not in conflict — they are 'three communicating vessels' (social, financial, environmental). Community-integrated ground floors unlock a new revenue stream from neighbours, not just a CSR add-on.
Key Takeaways
- •Only 20% of residents in the southwest Netherlands feel tourism strengthens social connection between residents — Danik Nijland identifies this as a major untapped opportunity for hotels to address.
- •Amsterdam raised its tourist tax to 12.5% (approx. 21% total with VAT); Dimitris Manikis predicts tourism businesses will go bankrupt within two years, with residents regretting the decision — this is the central issue in upcoming Dutch municipal elections.
- •David Turnbull surveyed 2,000 neighbours before designing Denizen's 450+ sqm Kreuzberg lobby-without-rooms, distilling community needs to two problems: loneliness and errand paralysis. The most-used installation is a DHL parcel station, not a coffee offering.
- •A DHL parcel station outperforms a €6.50 cappuccino as a community draw — Turnbull warns that charging premium hotel prices in supposedly community-facing spaces proves the hotel has not understood its role.
- •The largest commercial real estate fund in Germany (200 hotels) commissioned Denizen to solve empty lobbies (9am–6pm). The pilot grew into a 1,000-property European network of hotels, cafes, co-working spaces, and gyms — modelled on Urban Sports Club and ClassPass.
- •Three in five Berlin startups have never leased office space, representing untapped demand for hotel ground floors as productive work environments without formal office commitments.
- •Hotels for Locals is receiving 1–2 hotel applications per week; Thomas van Leeuwen's analysis shows adoption is individual-driven (enthusiastic GMs or marketing managers) with no correlation to star rating, luxury level, or brand type.
- •Van Leeuwen's own office building (€300,000/year rent) now generates €100,000/year profit by renting to events — applied to hotels, this 'four-dimensional design' approach treats time-of-day usage as a design constraint from the outset.
- •Manikis argues that hospitality serves 1.4 billion travellers annually across radically different purposes (health, work, family, social), and that the industry has 'overdone' the lifestyle narrative — most hotels serve functional, not aspirational, needs.
Transcript
Next up, we have a very interesting panel discussion and I would like to welcome back on stage Yan Housing. [applause] Thank you so much. And let me use this time to thank all of our great hosts and students that they are on stage to introduce us that well. Thank you, Maya and Lucas and Lucas. Um let's move to the panel discussion or actually conversation and maybe battle. No, not a battle. A good a a good discussion. Um we will talk about how hotels but tourism in general actually can be a driv...
