behind the counter x Julien Routil
Taking ownership and taking risks are two sides to the same coin and no one knows this better than Julien Routil, Co-Founder of Slo Living hostel, Away Hostel and Groom Cocktail Bar. His journey along with his business partners, Charlotte Bollard and Pierric Suom is one that is bold, refreshing and extremely insightful. Join us in an inspiring behind the counter series interview with Julien as he shares with us his story and thoughts on the future of the travel industry.
Tell us what your life was like before starting a hostel?
Ok, so where do I start haha. I’m originally from Lyon and I was born and raised in Lyon. After completing my education from a business school in Marseille, I moved to Paris to work in a consultancy firm. I really loved my life in Paris because it’s a very cool city and when you are twenty-five years old, you have a great social life, but professionally speaking, it was okay, I learned a lot but it wasn’t my dream job. I really didn’t think or feel like it was the job of my life or anything like that. I knew I wanted to change something, but I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur at that time or imagined being one.
I remember the exact moment, being in this gigantic building of the Ministry of Finance in Paris executing boring missions that nobody cared about and realising, “okay, this is not for me”. After a couple of months I decided to change my way of life and quit the job; I convinced Charlotte, my wife, to leave France and travel for a year instead.
So how did travelling around the world lead to starting a hostel of your own
We travelled around the world in 2010. This trip was a much-needed energy booster! We had one long year to think about what we wanted to do next. We talked about it on the buses, the trains, when we were walking or running around. They were very important moments in my life. It made me switch completely and realise that we can achieve very cool stuff in our life if we really wanted to! we also stayed in a lot of hostels and met so many amazing and inspiring people.
This travel gave me the strength, passion, freedom and time. I realise now the most precious stuff in the world is freedom and time. When you have absolutely no consequences of your time, you can really think about yourself and about what you want, and do what you want.
I think it’s very rare in our lifetime to have such moments because we are always so busy with our studies, job, family, kids, hobbies, etc.
After that, when I came back to France, I created my own travel blog called travel VOX with other travellers. I worked on this beautiful project for two years; it was very interesting and I learned so many things that I still use today like digital marketing, content creation, WordPress, how to partner with brands, etc. I also met a lot of interesting and very passionate travel bloggers.
I soon realised though that if we wanted to have kids and/or keep travelling, I would prefer to work on something that was more secure rather than just being a travel blogger, even if I started to earn enough money to live with that project (which was already quite cool at that time for a travel blogger!).
In the meantime, I noticed a long time ago that in France, particularly in Lyon, there were no good quality hostels, there was no solution for backpackers, budget travellers or families. Accommodations like small hotels, B&Bs were available but with not so reliable services and didn’t bring that particular hostel feeling. It was very strange because France is one of the first most visited destinations in the world! I’ve also travelled to Europe; particularly to Portugal, Germany and Turkey and stayed at new generation hostels that were great. So when I saw the gap, I said: “Okay, let's do that in France.”
So my wife Charlotte, my best friend Pierric (whom I know since we were two-year-olds) and I, got together to make this happen. We each brought something significant to the table; I had my business acumen and love for travel & culture, Charlotte is an architect and Pierric is a Finance expert. We make a great team, and we balance each other’s strengths and weaknesses. So yes, that’s how it started and we opened our first hostel in 2014.
So when you stayed at the hostels during your travels, what stood out for you in terms of the hostel community?
For me, hostels are quite unique. It’s a very spontaneous and simple relationship you build with the people of the hostel community. It is so easy to walk up to someone and say, “Hi, How are you?” or “where are you from?” It’s difficult to have this anywhere else; you don’t build these kinds of relationships in a hotel. Maybe in a B&B but mostly with elderly people or even in a bar or restaurant, you go with your friends and family, you might end up talking to someone but they would mostly be from your own town or country.
There is an absence of curiosity in those environments compared to when you are in a hostel and that’s what I really love about the hostel atmosphere, sharing a dorm with like-minded strangers, having breakfast together, discussing your plan for the day and people are genuinely interested in getting to know you. It’s like a real human social networking platform to meet people from all around the world.
What do you think is important to get right before starting a hostel?
It was definitely harder than I expected, even if you have a great team. You can’t think that it will be easy to run a hostel just because you love travelling or you know the hostel vibe and community very well, or you think you know how hostels work from a customer perspective. It’s much more complicated than that; you deal with a lot more than that like security, real estate, tourist market, I.T., marketing, finance, human resources, customer complaints, quality compliances and the list goes on. It’s a really fascinating and rewarding project, but it’s very vast in terms of how you deal with all the aspects that come with it. So it’s really important to carefully deal with them, you cannot ignore even one of them.
Second, you need to have an excellent team from the beginning. I think if I started out alone and if I didn’t have Charlotte or Pierric, I would have made many mistakes. Of course also the entire team including receptionists and housekeepers, so yes recruitment is also very important. Especially when your business grows like currently we have two hostels and a bar in Lyon and we are thirty-five people, you really need to be able to rely on your team to ensure that the guests have a good experience and the daily operations are running smoothly.
How has it been during the pandemic outbreak? Have there been any challenges?
It was quite different between the beginning of the pandemic compared to now. We decided to close both of our hostels because it was a dangerous situation for our team and for our customers since everybody was together in the dorms and the common areas. This was the right decision to close and even if we let our hostels opened, there were no travelers or customers in France during both lockdowns here.
It was very strange because it was the first time we ever closed in six years since we started. We didn’t know when we were going to open again or what to do with our team or the rent. There were so many questions!
We tried not to panic, be optimistic, reassure our employees and try to find solutions quickly. Dealing with the COVID/Lockdown situation in March 2020 (and it is not over…) was definitely one of our biggest challenges. We also had a lot of help from our government, they paid a major part of wages for all employees, which was not the case in many other European countries, unfortunately for many hostellers.
So how did you end up utilising the downtime?
Between the two lockdowns, we reopened for four months from July to October. Our occupancy rate was not too bad, initially, we were afraid because during this period in France, in summer, we usually welcome a lot of international travellers from Europe and all around the world. 75–85% of our guests were usually international travellers and we had a very small minority of guests from France.
However people from France continued travelling within the country and we received a few guests from neighbouring countries like Belgium, Switzerland and Germany. People were travelling a bit, so we had a little bit more activity than expected. We launched different kinds of services like co-living and long-term living, and we prepared for it before reopening. We refurbished some of the rooms, the furniture, the beds and services, and our guests really liked it. During the downtime, we also did a lot of maintenance work in our buildings like repainting and fixing the floors.
Charlotte and Pierric and I also utilised the downtime to work with our investors. we and rethought the project and discussed our plan of action and strategy for the future (our brand values, developement, etc). Like wiping the board clean and re-strategising from scratch.
What do you think the future of travelling will look like?
That’s a good question. When you see things like big parking spaces made for planes because there is no expected travel till mid-2021, it really makes you wonder, “What are we going to do now? and how are our international guests going to come back to France in the next couple of years?”
Although I feel like things might get better by the second semester of 2021, travel-wise. In the meantime, during spring and summer, I think people will continue to travel locally and discover their own countries because it’s in their blood to travel.
The local tourist market in France this summer performed very well, like the hotels and hostels in the mountains, the French Riviera and the Oceanica side of France had a very good season. But it only represents a couple of months in the year.
So I think people will keep on travelling and keep on discovering the world in the other way. Things will obviously be different for the immediate future but of course, at the end, everything will get better.The only short term objective for touristic professionals is to save their treasury and survive in 2021!
Another important point from my point of view is the environment which will be very important for international travellers, especially the younger generations of travellers. I think they will travel more often with trains and buses and maybe less long distant to reduce their carbon footprint. Hostellers will have to challenge that and think about how to compensate for these carbon emissions during the backpacker’s travels. Hostels will have to adapt because more and more of the young travellers are pro-environment and as an entrepreneur who strongly believes in sustainable development, we need to listen to our guests and take up this challenge.
So I do think hostels will have a bright future because I am sure that during the lockdown and the downtime, many people would have figured the need to travel, the need to meet other people and experience different cultures and where do you find all of this?
Hostels, of course! I think people would be very happy to travel again when it’s safe to do so again.
