behind the counter x Marco Fiallo
Community Hostels, Ecuador
This week behind the counter, we have Marco Fiallo, Founder and CEO of Community Hostels and Community Travel Group, in Quito, Ecuador.
An avid traveller, a community enthusiast and a lover of all things gastronomy, Marco believes in complete cultural immersion when travelling and that food is the essence of bringing people together in a hostel.
Join us, as Marco shares his journey with the Community Hostels, and provides his fitting insights on what makes a hostel great and how a hostel can contribute to the local community and economy.
Tell us a bit about yourself? What was life like before starting out in the hospitality industry?
I was born in Norwalk, Connecticut and then lived in Ecuador from 12–20 years old. At 20 I came back to the States and joined the United States Marine Corps for 5 years. After working in the military, I went back to Ecuador for a year to take some time off, I came back stateside and went to culinary school, and I did a really intensive three-month course.
I then moved to Oregon, U.S.A where I began and completed my undergraduate studies. Post that I was offered a banking job in New York, but I declined it. Instead, I took up a job in Oregon which was for the Federal government but that was too slow-paced for me and I’m a pretty high-paced guy. I had not taken into account the company culture and I had made a bad decision to take that job. In hindsight, that is what sent me over to start the hostels, so in the long run, it all worked out!
During my study abroad in 2010, I went on a backpacking trip to India for a month. Back then, there weren’t a lot of hostels in India, at least not with the ambience that I had been used to. We also didn’t speak Hindi, and we were getting taken advantage of. That was my ‘Aha’ moment. I then started to ideate in what way I could someday open a hostel that had an ambience, created a community, was honest, and looked out for its clients. That was the beginning of Community Hostel.
I thought about starting Community Hostel and where I could open it. Since my parents are from Ecuador, that seemed like an obvious choice. I also talked to my friends who backpacked across India with me about making it happen and how we could differentiate a new hostel opening up in Ecuador. So the idea of starting a hostel was strong, and I started doing some research on tourism in Ecuador and I found that there were a million tourists visiting Ecuador every year.
There was a 10% growth in tourism in the past 10 years and even from 2007 to 2008, during the recession of the United States tourism still had a 7% growth here. So it seemed interesting that the industry itself was kind of recession-proof too, that’s how the thought process of me wanting to start a hostel started shaping up.
What concept did you have in mind when you started your first hostel?
There were things I came across and things that I experienced when I travelled around that made sense, things that made me go WOW and that I adopted when I started my hostel.
My main focus was always based on past experiences of mine. A friend of mine and her family were really involved in the food industry here in Oregon and I was a Sous Chef at events they hosted at their house. Sometimes there were events including famous Portland Oregon chefs who would serve food on a long table and everybody sat together and ate that family style meals, and I thought that was incredible!
At the hostel, we used to cook one dish every night, we would also do variations of vegan and vegetarian for our guests and to include everyone. We all sat down at 7:30 p.m to eat together. That’s what made us have that ambience where everybody got to have a conversation. We all had a voice. There was no discrimination and we had people from the age of 70 to 17.
So for me, the essence of what a hostel has to do is you have to meet people. If you don’t do that, the hostel has failed you and so for me, food is the essence behind bringing people together in a hostel too.
So in our hostels, we do breakfasts and dinners but we don’t do lunch because we want our guests to go out and experience the culture. Breakfasts, however, are super important, because when I travelled around the world, I had some of the best breakfasts and I want my guests to have the best breakfast they could ever have in a hostel. That would probably make them stay another night, which happened to me in San Cristobal de las Casas in Mexico. I stayed at a hostel with the worst bed ever, and I got up the next day having decided that I’m going to move out after having breakfast and their breakfast was so good that I stayed. So I always wanted to have the best breakfast to keep you staying another night. I believe that food has the power to bring people together and the dinner table is the heart of every hostel.
Having said that, another thing super essential for me is providing comfort to the guests. For example, I had all the bed frames 10 centimetres longer because allow more space for somebody that’s taller and they won’t feel constricted in their bunk beds. Even the pillows; I spent 2 hours at the store, literally trying out different pillows on the floor, just trying to figure out what size of pillows were actually the perfect ones in terms of size and comfort.
You have to get the basics down. You have to provide safety, security, comfort, good food, a good bed to sleep in and rest. We have 45 beds; we used have 24, and it always feels like home, but my ideal hostel would be no bigger than 80 to 100 beds because I think that’s manageable. It can still feel like home and we can still nail down the creation of community.
What is your take on community building and how does the hostel contribute to the local community?
In the beginning, we actually gave a portion of our profits to a non-profit, now we sponsor a non-profit 12k race that is put together by my dad. We do not charge the runners at all but give out prizes and the mission of the race is to find the next athlete to represent Ecuador around the world.
Also across the street is a local market and we have great relations with the guys there so all our produce is locally sourced. Since all our meals are cooked to order, people sign up for dinner by 5 p.m. which we serve by 7:30 p.m. So every day we literally go out to the market across the street and buy the fruits and veggies, and the meat and seafood from the meat market.
However, one of the biggest ways we have contributed to the local community is the impact that we had on the local economy around us. Like after starting the hostel, there were these micro-businesses that opened up around. While we were not the first hostel to be in the area we did promote the location a lot more. For example, before we arrived, the indigenous market that was in front of us, which is called Mercado Central, was about to be shut down and torn down. Through tourism, we were able to help keep and revive the market.
A lot of hostels here that I visited would tell me since I lived in the States prior, “don’t go there to the market, you’ll get robbed and it’s dirty, you’ll get sick,” but when I got there, I said, “this is the culture dude, this is why I travel, you should go too!”
When I travelled to India, I was told not to eat the street food because I would get sick but I saw 30 people at this train station eating a curry that a guy was selling off a food cart and it was amazing. I didn’t know if my stomach would hold up but I ate it and it was incredible!
So even here, we ended up doing the walking tour and that brought people to the market. I’m a huge foodie; I love to cook and I grew up literally a block away from this street that has everything from indigenous food to coastal food to Amazonian food to just normal street food from Ecuador. I would take people on a food tour up there for free and I’d say, “Hey guys this is what Ecuador is about!” Now every hostel around, the first thing they tell you is to check out the local market and tour around our neighbourhood!
Tell us more about the free walking tours?
Well, the model of our free walking tour is slightly different, it’s not exactly free. It’s pay what you like, it’s basically tip-based. So there’s been somebody who’s paid 2 dollars for a tour and we’ve also had people give a 100 dollar tip.
The premise of the free walking tours is that our guides literally earn their tours. There are plenty of people who don’t have any money and walk away, taking it for free, which is okay, but our guides are so blessed and they do such an amazing job that they actually get paid pretty well compared to the average country rate for a guide.
Our guides earn double the average through tips because of the volume of people that we attract as it’s not only from the hostel, we get people from all over the place. Our guys are paid a more livable wage than what the agencies are paying them. We make sure that our people are taken care of because then they give the best experience to our guests, also they get to take more money home at the end of the day. It’s a win-win situation.
How badly was travel & tourism affected in Ecuador during the pandemic, what were the challenges you faced?
When the pandemic hit, all our hostels shut down. I would imagine it’s the same in most parts of the world. We could not pivot to anything different because Ecuador completely shut down, we had a curfew from 2 p.m to 5 a.m.
Nobody could leave their house and, of course, empty planes flew in with and took all the foreign nationals and tourists out. Our main guests were international, so we had nobody to cater to.
So that was a kind of hard place to be in. To see eight years of your life that you’ve invested into the hostel and love doing suddenly go into standstill mode. Letting go your employees whom you love and care for was really hard to do because we weren’t just a team, we were family.
Things are slowly improving though, the Community hostel Alausi is the only hostel opened, Community Hostel Quito and Community Hostel Banos remains closed because there’s not enough tourism yet to open back a whole chain. At the moment Ecuador has opened up tourism to people who have taken their vaccination shot’s and won’t need to Quarantine themselves. So that’s good but the cases in Ecuador itself are going up. So that’s good, and we are seeing tourists come back, mainly from the United States. We are planning to reopen either in the fall or for the new year.
Any future plans on expanding?
Currently, I’m in talks with a friend of mine that owns some land in a higher up part of Banos and so on top of a mountain so we’re planning on doing a lodge there. I’ve been looking for a place by the beach because I believe the coast would be good too, but as of now, I think we need to restart the three hostels up again and go from there. Expanding maybe to one or two more hostels along the backpacker route of Ecuador, on the way down to Peru or going up to Colombia would be great too, but I feel the lodges would be something that I am way more interested in opening up and offering to our guests…
This year has been a super tough year with the hospitality and tourism industry taking such a hit in Ecuador. I’ve also personally gone through a lot, but I really believe that travel helps get you back to your absolute self. When we leave our home and everything we know, we also leave behind all our preconceived notions of what people believe we should be, who we should be in our homes, in our country. We leave behind our family perceptions and expectations, and this allows us to grow, to be us again and to go back with confidence, acceptance, and self-love.
For me, it’s really about how we help people transform back to their authentic selves. I’ve talked to many people who are going through a lot of transitions in life. They are in between jobs, they quit their career or went to university for a degree because their parents wanted them to do, not because they wanted to. Some have a broken heart or lost a family member or they’re going through a midlife/ quarter age crisis.
So at some point, everyone realises, “Oh my God! What am I doing?” and then they start to travel, “to find themselves” and we at Community Hostel help with that process and now we want to take it further and that’s how the concept of the lodges comes into play.
I feel these lodges can be a place of retreat, to do yoga, meditate, and get in touch with your inner self. Have an experience where you can get away from technology for a bit, sitting down, do some writing, and do some soul searching and get away from the world. A great place with great food, experiences, a place to create Community.
Last year during the pandemic I was travelling through Europe and because I was going through so much, the closing of the hostels, the end of a relationship, a loss of identity, dealing with expectations, and travel is what allowed me to get back to myself.
After that, I realized that the mission of the hostels is to have an impact in people’s lives to help “Change the world one hostel at a time”. Meeting people, being me, learning, and adventuring is what helped me come back to me. That’s the most important part to me, that everything we do translates into something meaningful for our guests.
What according to you makes a great hostel?
I think that as a guest or a traveller when you walk into a hostel, you should feel welcomed, happy and a sense of belongingness.
It’s a place where nobody is going to judge you and that for me again goes back to our dinner table where we all sit down and eat together. It doesn’t matter if you’re from Ecuador, it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white or Asian, or if you’re the CEO of a company or if you’re a server, nobody cares!
For me, integrating people is what a hostel should aim for, like we have people 60–70 years of age who come in and stay with us and it’s amazing when they say, “Hey, I’ve barely gone out in the last 40 years of my life, thank you for taking me out on a bar crawl.” Another time we had a 17-year-old stay with us, and his mom called to inform us he wasn’t feeling well and asked us if we could take care of him and we said “for sure” and we did. There are so many people that have fallen in love in the hostel and there are plenty of stories like these which for me is what a hostel should create.
I really feel that hostels play a big role in changing the world and I think that we’re breaking down those social and economic barriers between people because you kind of force that integration. That’s why I think hostels will always be a model that will survive because hostels strive off human connection.
I mean as a hostel if you can’t connect people then you’re in the wrong and you’re not staying at a hostel, you’re probably staying at a hotel pretending to be a hostel.
It only happens at hostels where you just drop everything and be yourself. You can be whoever you want to be and once you get on that road you just continue to meet like-minded people. It doesn’t matter who you are, people keep going back to that road and that’s why hostels can act as a centre of regaining yourself, I truly believe that’s its a powerful place for anyone to be in.
