behind the counter x Kraig and Rod
The MadHouse Hostel and The RoadHouse Hostel, Prague
Hostel owners, Kraig Cooper and Rodrigo Medina are pretty much like two sides of the same coin and their dynamic partnership is the reason behind the success of two of the most famous and award-winning hostels in Prague, The MadHouse Hostel and The RoadHouse Hostel.
Join us as they share their story and tell us about the challenges they faced during the pandemic and their takeaways from what has been the toughest year in hospitality history.
How did you guys meet?
Kraig: I was travelling at the time when I first met Rod at a hostel in Prague where he had just started working and actually helped open because it was a brand new hostel at the time.
Rod: He was checking in when we were trying to get as many people excited for the pub crawl.
Kraig: And I think we properly met at the end of the pub crawl when we were both hungry, so we went to Mcdonald’s together to grab a bite. You can call it serendipitous if you wish! I properly met Rod at the end of the pub crawl and on my first night staying at the hostel. Rod’s story is a bit different than mine on how he came to Prague so I’ll let him explain that.
Rod: I met a friend when I was studying abroad and a few years later, at the time I was finishing my studies, we got back in touch again. She invited me to come open a hostel with her and work in Prague. So basically, I thought it would be a great summer. I’m the type of person who doesn’t think about what can go wrong, so I said: “yes, let's go, let's do it.” What was supposed to be three to six months is now years and one thing let to another, I met Kraig, we started our own hostels in Prague and ever since I’ve been here.
What made you want to start a hostel together in Prague?
Rod: It was three and half years of hostel life before we started our own, which was great. When I met Kraig, we just vibed very quickly, and we were just taking it one day at a time and living the hostel life. Eventually, we convinced Kraig to come back and work and both of us enjoyed the lifestyle more and more. Sometimes you don’t really realise it but a lot of ideas start developing in your mind, so we started thinking of a lot of ideas about starting our own hostel.
Kraig: For me, when I came in, I had been backpacking for about a year between Europe and Asia. When I stopped in Prague at the hostel where Rod was working, I ended up being offered a volunteer position for a couple of weeks. So that was my first chance to work in a hostel and Rod was the one that offered me the position. When I came back to work full time, a position I was offered a couple of months later, Rod and I had become great friends and we were really enjoying the hostel life.
It wasn’t intended in the beginning to open up our own hostel but it was just the hostel lifestyle and the passion for hostels that kind of grew on us over time, to the point where we just decided that we couldn’t really go back to a regular nine-to-five job. We needed to make something happen, and so we just went ahead and did.
What is the concept behind both the hostels?
Rod: I do just remember a bit of some of the initial conversations that we used to have. We were running a hostel with 120 beds, this was before we even started The MadHouse Hostel which is the first hostel we started together. Kraig and I used to discuss the kind of guests we wanted to host, social people who will take part and all that. It wasn’t like we wanted to start a big, raging party hostel, we wanted it to be a smaller and more inclusive social hostel where people would be excited to take part in the hostel activities like pub crawls and events.
However, the kind of guests we were getting also plays a big role in determining the kind of hostel it eventually became. I mean The MadHouse Hostel is very well known to be a party hostel. but the concept behind it was to a socially inclusive hostel. So with The Roadhouse Hostel, we wanted to keep the core value of social inclusiveness. A;so, the kind of guest we were getting weren’t exactly the hardcore party crowd.
Kraig: It also tracks back to where we were at the time we started The MadHouse Hostel, there were a lot of factors that played an important role in shaping the concept behind it, like our experiences at the time, our age, our interests and the evolution of hostels themselves. Hostels have changed a lot in the last decade and we’re always trying to keep up with the times. In terms of the guests as well, we’ve always been trying to stay on top of what the guests are looking for and trying to fit the needs of the new generation travellers.
Nonetheless, taking into account all of our experiences, the core values of both the hostels are very much entwined; the social aspect and experience and the culture of both the hostels are very similar. But yes, we realised with time that not everybody wants to party as much as the other, so we wanted to differentiate the two hostels and try to open ourselves to a bit of a wider market.
What were the challenges you guys faced during the pandemic especially with an overall reduction in the pricing of beds?
Kraig: Obviously, price drops were a challenge because there was a lack of demand due to the uncertainty of travel in terms of COVID restrictions and quarantine rules. All those sorts of things really made a big dent in the overall travel demand and therefore the prices were at an all-time low.
Uncertainty, though! The uncertainty was a big challenge in itself. The uncertainty of our existence is a big thing and we didn’t know how things were going to unfold and it brings with it the challenge of finding a way to survive.
Financing was difficult too, they say that there are loans and the government’s going to help you but the banks don’t really want to give money to anybody in the tourism industry because it’s a risky bet. What could we do? It wasn’t in our control and there’s nothing we could’ve done about it. I think the tourism industry easily got hit the hardest all around the world. Our lives were pretty much turned upside down.
I don’t know, for myself it was difficult and I think I can speak for Rod too because this is the type of job where we put everything into it. We always said that this is a 24x7, 365 days kind of job and it’s something we have lived with for more than 10 years. I mean this is how we did it and then all of a sudden one day, everything changes. We took a week to digest that our lifestyle was just taken away from us all of a sudden. Then again, the uncertainty of not knowing what’s going to happen and then when summer came with so much uncertainty again, it was pure survival mode.
Fortunately, we were able to get a little bit more help from the government and make it this far and we’ll probably figure out some things along the way. But overall just dealing with that emotional and mental stress of not knowing what’s going to happen has been rough for us.
Rod: I think Kraig has summed it up very well but I’d also like to add that the lack of international guests was a major challenge too. I mean for hostels it’s mostly international guests, so I think Kraig’s touched a very good point that suddenly from one day to another everything was taken away. One of the things that we also struggled a lot with during this whole time of waiting and doing nothing was having a lot of ideas and feeling powerless to do anything about it.
Over the years, the reason why Kraig and I work so well together even though we’re so different is that we always manage to come on top by feeding off each other’s strengths and planning things. So we have all these ideas but we can’t do anything because everything’s changed so drastically. We had some ray of hope last summer when we were allowed to reopen again but then things starting going bad again. The rules change day by day, so at some point, it gets really hard to keep up and you realise there aren’t too many directions we could have taken.
Kraig: We put our everything into The MadHouse and The RoadHouse, this is something we have built ourselves and we weren’t ready to just give that up, but it’s a tough decision and probably something a lot of businesses had to deal with throughout the past year. It was difficult to just hold on and not lose everything that we had worked for over all these years.
Did you also have to reduce staff during the past year or take on Volunteers instead?
Kraig: Staffing was definitely a big challenge. Last summer we managed to run both hostels with a very small group including myself and Rod. We went right back in there working several shifts and doing almost everything with a very small team.
We had difficulty finding volunteers again because it was such a small window and we didn’t know when we were going to open again. So last summer we scrambled a lot and made do with a short season, so this year we tried recruiting volunteers earlier because we have to basically start from scratch which is a challenge in its own way.
Our hostel is not just run by volunteers, we split between receptionists and live-in volunteers and the live-in volunteers are a big part of The MadHouse because they are a big part of the social atmosphere. The majority of them over the years were initially guests who stayed with us and then stayed on for longer. Now, as we reopen, we need to find new ways to recruit volunteers.
Rod: That’s actually been a positive thing that’s come out of the COVID situation; it has allowed us to actually think outside the box.
Kraig: We’re looking at it as a kind of fresh start or a reset. It’s a chance for us to evaluate how we were running things before and how we can maybe do things a little bit more efficient now.
Less is definitely more, can you give us some advice on community building?
Kraig: In terms of the hostel community and the community we built at each of our hostels, it really starts from just making everyone feel welcome from the get-go, right from when they walk in the doors.
Rod had mentioned earlier about our concept of social inclusiveness and it comes from a genuine place. So I think people can see that as soon as they walk in and then it’s contagious, it goes from us to the guests and then from one guest to another, it comes to a full circle.
The idea is to get to know people on a first-name basis and, commonly, you’ll be in the middle of check-in and another guest will come through and immediately introduce themselves to the new arrivals. They meet other guests they’re sharing the dorm room with and everybody kind of gets to know each other and it starts becoming a community like that. I do believe it starts right from the beginning, and how you treat people and welcome them into your hostel.
When we first opened up MadHouse, there were only three of us working there; Rod, I and another friend of ours and we did everything, including taking people out and checking them in, basically all and everything in between too. Then once we started hiring people, people kind of saw this is how we are, this is how we like to run things and they kind of fall in line as well. When we hire people too we really do look for certain intangible qualities. Again, I can’t stress enough but it all truly comes from a real genuine place.
Rod: This is actually one of my favourite things; when I’m at the hostel, sometimes the guests that have been there for barely 24 hours are doing what I’m supposed to be doing; greeting people and showing them around the hostel. Obviously, the main thing, like Kraig mentioned before, it’s our home, so we treat them the way we would want to be treated when we come home.
Kraig: There are no barriers between our guests and our staff. A lot of time people tell us it’s hard to make out who’s working here and who’s not because everyone is generally having a good time and the atmosphere’s fairly relaxed. I mean obviously, we do have a reception desk where we check-in guests but it’s not the typical guest check-in experience especially at The MadHouse because the first thing we do is offer them a beer which certainly goes over well with most of our guests. At RoadHouse we don’t even have a desk, we sit with our guests on the living room sofa or at the kitchen table, have a chat first and then check them in. Our Volunteers again, also make the experience so seamless by just hanging out with them as friends and are extremely approachable and friendly.
What are your Individual takeaways from last year?
Rod: I have in mind flexibility. How to be more flexible, I mean 2020 has been a very unusual year, to say the least, and we’re all facing situations we never imagined. It’s like when the volcano erupted in Iceland where no one could come in, but like 10 times more hardcore!
Kraig: It’s definitely been a test of our mental strength and patience. We’re just trying to be optimistic and stay positive in a time when it’s very difficult because there’s not a lot of positivity around us. It really just let us re-evaluate the things that were important to me in my life, personally and professionally.
It’s given us a chance though, to appreciate things more and find a bit of more balance in our lives. Maybe going forward, once we get back to work, we’ll find a better balance. I think you can always look at anything you do in retrospect and find a better way to do it if you have the chance to stop and think about it and re-evaluate it. We’ve managed to have a big pause and we had a lot of time to think about it, and nows it’s time to maybe move forward more positively.
