HoCoSo CONVERSATION
HoCoSo CONVERSATION
"OPEN DOOR INITIATIVE – Helping Ukrainian Refugees Find Accommodation Solutions"
A non-profit webinar initiative entitled ‘Open Door’ was held on Friday 1st April 2022 to raise awareness for the various projects providing accommodation solutions to aid the grave Ukrainian refugee crisis currently affecting many European states. The hospitality sector is already supporting the refugee crisis in numerous ways and the webinar brought together representatives from several initiatives to talk about their projects, discuss the challenges they face, and to identify how others can help and contribute. Open Door was hosted by the hosts of the Hospitality Resilience Series (which was a series of webinars with experts to help hospitality professionals be in a better place to get through the Covid-19 crisis): Jonathan Humphries, HoCoSo; Jon Hazan, Atlas Events; and Chris Mumford, Cervus Leadership Consulting. The hope is that this simple initiative can boost the profile of these desperately needed humanitarian projects to all countries across Europe, helping those currently operating or those who want to help but are not sure how to do so.
The need to provide accommodation for the millions of Ukrainian refugees will only continue in the coming months. By acting now, the industry can put measures in place to meet this need.
Webinar panellists:
Alliance4Ukraine, Nils Omland
A one-stop-shop platform for refugees from Ukraine entering Germany. This project is supported by Google and the BMW Foundation amongst others. The platform is able to provide multiple solutions to many of the refugees’ needs, from accommodation, legal support, clothing and jobs.
Wunderflats, Jan Hase, CEO & Co-Founder
Housing support for displaced Ukrainian refugees providing access to apartments at no, or very low cost.
Unterkunft Ukraine, Felix Oldenburg, Board Member
https://unterkunft-ukraine.de/
An alliance of mission-driven organisations supporting solidarity in civil society and connecting refugees with available private accommodation.
Hospitality Helps, Michael Widmann, Co-Founder, & Preben Vestdam
https://hospitality-helps.org/en/home
Providing temporary hotel accommodation to Ukrainian residents by connecting them with hotels providing free stays in many countries.
Booking.com, Alexandra Wolframm, Head of Public Affairs DACH
Enabling accommodation partners in certain countries to support refugees by offering them a place to stay for free or at a significantly reduced rate. Booking.com will waive commission fees for these reservations.
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Jonathan Humphries [00:00:00] Welcome everybody. I am your co-host, Jonathan Humphries from HoCoSo and Hospitality Resilience Series. This is a webinar bringing us all together to highlight the incredible solutions created by the hospitality accommodation sector for the Ukrainian refugees and to connect you with all of the industry media partners. We see ourselves as a door opener to connect people to collaborate. Hence, we've labeled this the Open Door Initiative. We will be inviting each of the solution providers to highlight their initiative, talk about their challenges faced and consequent solutions, and how we can all move forward together. As dark as this period is, we want to use this as an opportunity to create a beacon of hope in a time of crisis. I would now like to introduce you to my co-host, Jon Hazan, from Atlas Events and the Hospitality Resilience Series. Over to you, John.
Jon Hazan [00:01:04] Thank you, Jonathan and thank you to everyone that joins us today. Before I hand over to my co-host Chris to introduce the webinar, just a few things about the format for today. As you may have noticed, the webinar is being recorded and will be used across various channels in the coming days for the promotion of this initiative. We'll start with an initial session of about forty five minutes of panelists and hosts' discussion before then opening up for a Q&A session. We will invite our guests to join as panelists. We will leave the chat function open throughout this initial discussion. So any guests that do want to pose any questions to the panelists, then please use the chat. If possible, we will post them to the panelists. But if not, obviously you have that opportunity to pose your question to the panelists in the Q&A session after the initial session. Without further ado, I'd like to hand over to Chris, who will now move on to introducing the next session.
Chris Mumford [00:02:05] Hi everyone, Chris Mumford here from Cervus Leadership Consulting. Great to be with you and looking forward to hearing more about the wonderful work a lot of our panelists are doing. So perhaps we can kick off with some introductions. It would be great to hear from each of you. Just a quick kind of two three minute introduction on yourself. Share some detail about your specific initiative, how it got started. You know, what the purpose is, what you're trying to achieve, how is it going so far? Quick summary will be terrific. Nils, could we perhaps start with you at Alliance4Ukraine?
Nils Omland [00:02:39] Thank you, Chris. So Alliance4Ukraine has been formed just a day after the war broke out, out of an initiative called Project Together, and what we are doing is bringing together all the different actors to solve big problems and in this case, the big refugee crisis. So we are all 12 people at the moment. I'm looking across the entire spectrum of needs of the refugees that includes accommodation, what we're talking about today, but it also includes medical and mental health and includes legal advice, that includes translation, job markets and so on. So that's a lot of things that refugees need to come here and accommodation's one of them. And I'm personally coordinating the space for accommodation, so what we're trying to achieve is to bring all the different players, all the different initiatives that can help or already do help together, informants such as the one we are having today or matching calls where we can talk about what each individual or organization needs and what it can bring to the table so that together we can solve this huge, huge problem.
Chris Mumford [00:04:00] Great. Thank you. And it's kind of a result of your conversation with Jonathan, the kick started this also. Thanks for being here. Michael, can we move to you because I know you have quite a personal connection behind, unfortunately, with this crisis that I think has kind of prompted you into action. So could you talk us through that?
Michael Widmann [00:04:18] Yes. Thanks for inviting me and Chris, Jon and Jonathan. And my family is half from Germany and half from Ukraine, and we had actually kind of anticipated this war happening and we moved out all of our family two or three weeks before the war started, except one grandmother who was too old and too sick to travel, so it's her eighty two years. She's in a basement with a medical team to attend to her, medical team is too much... It's one person looking after her. And of course, it is in itself quite heartbreaking enough on a family level to leave somebody behind. And on a wider picture, we are a consulting company, not a very large, of about 100 people globally and about 20 of those work in Ukraine. And so we have a team of 22 people in Kiev, and we offered all of them to go on a vacation before the war started because as we said, we anticipated. So out of 22, only one took this offer. As he, as I said, we don't believe it's happening now and if it's happening, it's happening in the eastern Donbass area. And we were also not sure, of course, that it would happen. But when it did, it was a double triple shock. It's a shock as a human being. Shock in a family and a shock in terms of a team having to take care of. And so we were kind of in the Paralytic stage and didn't know what to do really besides helping the immediate team members. But then we had some friends and quite distant friends. So moving out on the day after the invasion already, and one friend, she was supposed to come to join us and live with us for the time being in Vienna, and she moved out with her two kids. And I don't know who has family, but my daughter is five years old and two hours in the car with her are hell. But this friend of ours was in the car with her two kids for 72 hours, having to leave so fast and her husband behind. So in a traumatized stage, driving day and night, 72 hours waiting in the border and then we spoke to her on the phone and she said she's close to Vienna, and then we spoke to have noticed that she was almost falling asleep while we spoke. And so we were really worried for the pure safety of this family. And we ask her where are you? And she said, Well, I'm near Budapest. I said, Oh, it's not so close to Vienna, after all. And so we said, Listen, you know, we put you up in Budapest, just stay where you are. We organize a room, because she fled basically in a panic without money, without anything and it was a situation, where, she also, you know, it was difficult to think straight in this situation. So and because the day before a friend of our family who happens to be the head of Hilton in Austria and Central Europe reached out to me and said, I know your family is partially from Ukraine, if there's anything we can do, let us know. And so the very next day when we had this situation, I said, Listen, yesterday you told me you would help if needed. I need your help. I have a friend in Budapest. She would need accommodation. Can your hotel do so? And so he called up his colleague in Budapest, and within half an hour we had a free hotel room and so this family then moved to to this room in Budapest. And it was the first good thing which happened to them in basically four days. It was a little bit surrealistic for them to suddenly be in a luxurious hotel after going through an existential crisis. So this was, I sense, suddenly, you know, sometimes consultants are not so fast thinkers. But at this moment, you know, it dawned on us. We found something that can make a difference. So and in this stage now, so the clearest thing is I called up a couple of friends who have hotels or clients and said, How can you provide rooms? And everybody was quite helpful, but in that time also, and I think we have to be grateful to COVID for that. And so one thing I'm grateful to COVID about is that we learned what exponential growth is and we already at that stage saw that even if you want to help, you know, our help would be null if we don't organize ourselves on the industrial level on a large scale and so I reached out to some friends, acquaintances among us as was Jonathan Worsley, who happened to call us up a day before and so, so and then reached out to a mutual colleague, Preben Vestdam, who is now on the call a call from Hotel Swaps, who has a platform which could be transformed that we thought easily into our needs. So it was not so easy for people to speak about it after all, but we managed basically within three days to set up a complete booking platform because we thought there might be a couple of thousand people who need it, and we did not fully anticipate that we would need to cater to a couple of hundred thousand. So it's a different story. But so we set up this platform, which is basically fully automatic booking platform where you can get five points as a family fleeing the war and you can redeem it in one hotel, five nights or along your journey. And so our initiative is really squarely directed towards people on the run to provide some shelter for a short time before. So hopefully they can be taken care of in their final destination where they want to stay. And we also have two other initiatives we also organized long term accommodation in Vienna, so it's a separate initiative. And we have started to collect donations throughout, say, 25,000 team members of PKF, which is a large organization globally and we help in different ways. But the main initiative is now this Hospitality Helps. It's working well. It's unfortunately working too well. We have the big hotel groups on board Marriott, Hilton Intercontinental, Radisson, Aqua and we even hooked up to some of the reservation systems directly. And we have also some smaller groups on board, and this great initiative from Germany among us, is Dorint is fully on board. The Ruby is doing a great job and several others too many to name. So it was all great to bring some on board in large numbers. So we have now more than 500 hotels in about 50 countries on board and we can accommodate maybe 10,000 people per day, but we would need 100,000 200,000 a day. So we are basically totally out of inventory every day. To close it, our condition for anybody who wanted to work with us is everybody has to do it completely free of charge, so there has no reimbursements for everything. We don't collect funds to pay off anything. So when we collect funds it goes directly to the refugees. So creating this his team, the program as a structuture, as a team of STR, which is great help is putting all their free time into that. So that's the one thing we don't want to have even to go back to any commercialization of an effort. This was to help people, not to make money, not to gain publicity. And as such, we succeed. But at the same time, we fail desperately. And so what I need, to be very direct and blunt, are rooms. So anybody who gives me rooms is my friend. And so whatever you can do and if you have any hotels and know of, we are grateful. Yeah, I also applaud initiatives, Airbnb, Booking.com and we don't see ourselves as a competition. Ours is to provide relief on the run, totally free of charge, online, across borders, across brands. And that's basically it.
Chris Mumford [00:13:51] All right. Thank you. It's amazing what you've done in such a short time. Thanks for sharing that. Preben, while we're on Hospitality Helps, can you just quickly interject with how you got involved, how Hotel Swaps fitted into that.
Preben Vestdam [00:14:02] Yup. So I was called one night by Jonathan Worlsey from the Bench, and also Michael got involved very fast. Jonathan asked me if there was any way that I could imagine a reservation system which could be put in place to bring these good initiatives that Michael had started, but bring them into larger volumes. And we were quite fortunate in that sense because we are a reasonably small company so we can do things very fast. And we have an application already, which is a reservation system where hotels can load rooms into a system and then what we call guests can use a currency, we call it hotel coins to book these hotels. It's an exchange platform for people who own hotels so they can share rooms among one another. So we had that platform already and it was up and running, and the idea was, we then based on that platform, create a new system, a separate reservation system. So I said to Jonathan, Yeah, that would normally I would take about one month to do that because there's a lot of work to do. And so he said, what about 48 hours? And so we took on the challenge and actually we managed within 45 to 48 hours to set up a new platform where all the hotels, which were willing to help and join with offering free rooms could be set up, load their rooms into the system, and then we literally just invited people with a Ukrainian passport or a residence permit that they could apply for become members of the system. When they applied to become members, we would preload their account with five hotel coins. We set the pricing of all the hotels to one hotel client is one night we didn't work with seasonality or quality or hotels or anything. And then we allowed them to start booking in the platform. We then got a lot of help from STR and also from PKF, and all. We collected teams because they are part of it, which is rather manual setting the hotels and so on in the system and all that was donated free of charge and then wonderful hotel groups like Hilton, Marriott Accord and Intercontinental, really at very senior levels, supported the initiative and had webinars with all their general managers and franchise owners and really encouraged them to join. So now we have just passed 100,000 room nights or guest nights that we have booked as reservations. And it's really a tool where people can, when they arrive in a town, they can see what's available. Many people go to hotels already and ask if there's a room. The hotel can then say, we are member of this platform, go in and look, we don't have any other rooms in there. But if that's the Hilton, you can look at what the Marriott or the Intercontinental has available, so they can kind of spread the people across the cities. It is, as Michael say, it's growing exponentially, of course, on the guest site, because it goes viral as soon as a refugee has a free stay like that and can refresh until they will let anybody else know that they know who is also on the road. So on that side, there is definitely no challenge about selling the initiative. But we are, as Michael says, we need rooms, even though we constantly are swinging somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 room nights available in the platform for bookings. But they're also a matter of when they are and where they're spread across Europe. So we got it off and it's still growing exponentially. You know, our numbers from COVID is nothing compared with what we are seeing in terms of new cases arriving into the platform.
Chris Mumford [00:17:55] Fantastic. Thanks so much, Alexandra, can we move on to Booking.com and how you've been getting involved and helping the crisis?
Alexandra Wolframm [00:18:04] Yes, thank you. Yeah. Hello to you all, and thanks for this opportunity to talk about our initiative and speaking of platforms, I can just add what we're doing. So we've seen this terrible war, terrible humanitarian crisis of, well, unfolding and still growing worse and worse each day with millions of refugees so far and also the great help initiatives by hotels, the accommodation sector, the hospitality sector. And so we thought, what could we do to support this? And so we decided to just set up a special rate for refugees, which is integrated into our booking platform. So this was also the fastest way to do it. And it's been initially rolled out starting on 15th of March. It's been rolled out in 10 most affected countries, amongst which Germany, Austria, Poland and others. And now, just two days ago, we extended it to other countries. So now we have it activated in 21 countries and the initial phase, it's a temporary solution, a temporary shelter for refugees. And we thought that, well, we'd try until mid-April. But of course, with the war ongoing, that's not enough. So we've decided to extend to the 30th of June, end of June. Yeah. So this is one thing we're doing. And our partner, Soho Hotel and other forms of accommodation providers can make available this refugee rate, which is not only for free, but they can also offer reduced rates up to 50 percent. This was done in order to, well, to allow accommodation providers who want to help but cannot afford to do it at a completely free cost to participate in this initiative. And just adding we're also helping the Hilton hotel chain. I think everybody's aware of what they are doing, making available one million rooms to refugees, so we collaborate with them and with the UN refugee agency to distribute these rooms. So this is not publicly available, right? But it's done. We channel it to humanitarian NGOs, and they are channeled by the UN refugee agency. So this is what we do as well. Thank you.
Chris Mumford [00:20:59] Great. What's going on? Thank you for that. We've heard from hotels, but let's hear from maybe the apartment sector, Jan and Wunderflats. How have you got involved?
Jan Hase [00:21:11] So I am Jan, the CEO and co-founder of Wunderflats. We founded Wunderflats now almost eight years ago, and we basically operate the largest residential housing platform in Germany for temporary housing. So and we have a lot of experience in that temporary housing needs sector and the platform is actually semi-automated. So we have a lot of endpoints in the process where we helped with humans, for example, to organize viewings and which is a very simple example. And we use that technology to duplicate it in a way to offer it to people seeking refuge from the war happening in Ukraine and people that want to offer housing to these people. And we first started activating our own landlords and landladies and asked them, can you offer your apartment for free? Can you like maybe offer rooms for free? And then we open up a day later to the public and asking them publicly about private people listing their place. It could be rooms, it could be full apartments and to offer it actually to refugees for at least a month. So that's what we do. So we don't offer daily stays. But we help people to find a place to get settled or to really calm down. And by now, we already provided almost 400,000 nights to people in almost 20,000 apartments. A lot of them are actually rented for more than six months. So yeah, 70 percent are for free. And the other 30 percent is especially the unlimited rent at the apartments that you can rent without any limitations and which are offered for very low rates. So I don't know the people that are familiar with the Berlin housing market, and we have like four room apartments for 250 euros being offered. And for people fleeing from from Ukraine, which is amazing, like it wasn't yeah, it wasn't expected. I didn't expect such a mass actually of apartments being offered at so low prices but still for us, the same as all the others and all this because before we are running out of accommodation of places we can offer. So we are currently also in talking with other initiatives, trying to see if you can combine efforts. So we still have roughly 50,000 requests open from refugees and only 7,000 apartments left. So here you see the discrepancy, and especially people that were able to stay in a hotel for a few nights and now looking for something more permanent. I know, like as a second wave coming and to us, looking for accommodation. So that's basically what we do.
Chris Mumford [00:24:06] Great.Thank you so much. And last but not least, Felix, can you tell us about Unterkunft Ukraine?
Felix Oldenburg [00:24:12] Hi. We're not really part of your industry, at least we weren't four years ago, I had absolutely nothing to do with real estate and accommodation and hospitality. Unterkunft Ukraine was started on the first day of the Ukraine war by a good friend of mine, simply as a list, as a form on the internet, people could register free private accommodation for people arriving from Ukraine. We helped a little bit and it went viral over a couple of days. More than 10,000 units of free private accommodation were offered with the Good.org, which is a charitable holding company that I lead. We took over the project and we have over the past four weeks not only mobilized three hundred and seventy thousand offers for free private accommodation, but we have helped connect more than 10,000 people with temporary homes in private homes, and we've implemented the security concept to make to prevent abuse. And we have over the past two weeks, begun to really plug ourselves into the existing public system of crisis response, working with aid organizations in hopefully soon in every region in Germany, who are essentially using our offer as a data, as a data source to then do the work of linking and providing a safe place for hosts and people from Ukraine to meet and get follow up support. This is the first in, I think, a lot of ways, and we have benefited a lot from the experience of several people in this group. So thanks to Alliance4Ukraine for connecting, to Booking.com, who've been helping us with expertize, Jan who we're working with, but also other people who have helped us climb this enormous learning curve, which is still happening. I think the long term vision for Unterkunft Ukraine is only emerging, but it's become it's becoming clear that free private accommodation for the first time can play a role in the response and societal response to a crisis like this, which is amazing if it works and we need to make it safe to make sure that it doesn't get abused. And the long term vision that's emerging is that there really is a new commons emerging here. Imagine what this enormous number of people who have said they would open their doors, open their homes once could potentially do in future crises, but for that to materialize we'll have to first master the completely enormous complexity of the response right now.
Chris Mumford [00:27:19] It is heartening to hear some of that. John, I'm going to hand over to you to take us forward from here.
Jon Hazan [00:27:25] Thank you, Chris. Yes, I echo that truly humbling and to Jonathan's point, a wonderful beacon of hope to hear how much is being done by you and how quickly you've responded. It's truly amazing. But I also want to, I think, take a moment to dwell on the challenges you faced and for those listening, for those watching, for those that want to get involved from the hospitality sector, I'm sure they will be facing challenges. I've no doubt that anything that we can share through this platform might help them in overcoming their challenges. So the question I will pose to each of you is; is there a one significant challenge that you have faced to date and how have you overcome it? And I know Michael, Jan and Alexandra have already alluded to scale being a huge part of the problem and costs being a part of the problem. I'd be fascinated to hear a little more about these challenges and hopefully how you have managed to overcome them. Again, let's start with Alliance4Ukraine and Nils maybe you could start on that, please.
Nils Omland [00:28:27] Yeah, thank you, John. So I'd say the biggest challenge is to accommodation when the crisis started was that our government, at least the government of Germany, was completely overwhelmed by the amount of people that came. Also by the logistics so in Germany, basically everybody came with trains or busses to Berlin. And Berlin had a public refugee shelter, which I believe had 160 spaces at that time, and each train would have 600 people, so we can see that this completely doesn't work. And then the great thing is that initiatives like Wunderflats and Unterkunft Ukraine stepped in, and a lot of volunteers stepped in into a role that in theory, government could fill or should fill and organized in a chaotic way at the beginning, but also in an effective way at the end. Not so efficient, but effective shelter and orientation for the refugees, so that has been a tremendous challenge to get things done without proper government facilities. And this is now gradually changing also the logistics of distributing people to other cities. And this also meant that a lot of communication was needed between the volunteers, between the platforms and I'm happy that Alliance4Ukraine have contributed a little bit, and I'm happy that everybody is so cooperative at these times and really thinking about refugees and not about their businesses, organizations and how they can benefit. No, it's not a marketplace like in capitalism, it's more like a self chosen socialism type of thing that we are working together to reach that goal. And yeah, a big thank you to all the organizations involved.
Jon Hazan [00:30:29] Yeah, undoubtedly a huge communications challenge. Thank you for that. Jan, Nils alluded to to your part in that. Is there something you would add to that?
Jan Hase [00:30:41] I can definitely sign up to the challenge, so we knew similar as Preben as quite early on that it would take a while to like rip, basically apart all of your production system and make it available for free. We didn't make it in 48 hours, for us it took actually almost two weeks. So because we have like that semi automated process, it's not fully automated and we needed to make sure that like that was an automatic email to send out. All the automation that we have in between and a credit scoring that we usually do that we don't apply that to their case. And rather in other things like safety features like checking the ideas of landlords and tenants and making sure, like checking, you know, like we worked with providers where they actually enabled us to to make almost one million checks for free. So it's amazing also the help from there providers. And in that situation, and the big challenge was okay, we knew it took, it takes us one or two weeks to do it, but we already have apartments and we need to help now. So we decided to basically duplicate the system where this manual process, work, duplicate that and offer it without any tech so that we match people manually. And in the beginning and and also check ideas and all that stuff, but do everything manually. And we had 23 employees on that at the very beginning and it was already clear, OK, that's not enough. It's not nearly enough to help enough people. And so we were activating volunteers. A lot of volunteers came to us. They asked if they can help, and we also asked openly for volunteers helping us. And then we also had a like a booth at Berlin main station where all refugees arrived and we try to, you know, like register people that wanted to have the standards, actually physically wanted to offer their place and try to get them through a safe system and match them with people fleeing from Ukraine and actually also make like, make or break records, so that we know where people are right. So because it was a mess, thanks, it was. So many people have managed to organize it somehow. So and we needed a lot of volunteers for that and people that are volunteering, you know, like everyone had this feeling that you want to help, right? And so we had a lot of people in the beginning that wanted to have like an hour a day or two hours a day. But the onboarding in the system already took like half an hour or something. And all the questions you have like how does it work, what training to check, how to speak to people, how to translate from Ukraine to German to English. You know, how can I be actually a safe intermediate between the people fleeing and the landlords who will not necessarily know, you know, what they are doing? They never did it before and never opened their home for people they don't know. Right? It's a very private thing. So and then the volunteers only having like one or two hours was very inefficient to them. And so after a few days, we decided, OK, we can only allow volunteers in our system, basically, and that can work at least four hours and just a day and at least like five days a week, which is already a huge commitment. And we still, for more than 100 people are doing it, having us in matching and manually, while we on the other side we're basically building the product or duplicating it from our system. Adopting it was it was a new challenge. So like that balance. That was very intense.
Jon Hazan [00:34:15] It's heartening to see the level of volunteering. I think you're right, so much of it depends on the will and volunteering of others. I wonder Felix if what Jan was talking about there resonated with you from your perspective of the similarities that of the challenges that you faced.
Felix Oldenburg [00:34:32] Definitely. I think there's a, we have to become more specific in our response as time goes by service platforms like Wunderflats. So others have become even more important. For the moment, we also have to pay very close attention to people arriving who may not be comfortable with complete self-service offers, who may need on the ground support by aid organizations who may need that bed for the first couple of nights. I think we have to, we will over time become, there will be a whole range of solutions and free private accommodation in personal homes hopefully for the first time, play a role, but we'll need all of these. In fact, I love the fact that we don't compete here, but we are trying to put together a new puzzle and that new puzzle is not in, I think in contrast to or in conflict with the the public, the government, the governmental response. But it needs to play hand-in-hand. If we can put that puzzle together, we will truly have achieved something amazing.
Jon Hazan [00:35:49] Actually, yes, so right, I'm sure, many providers watching or listening this will be viewing this through their own lens and they will face their own challenges and hopefully gain strength from these solutions provided. Alexandra, you mentioned the challenge of cost to the providers earlier. Is that something you can explain a little further?
Alexandra Wolframm [00:36:10] Yeah, thank you. Well, let me say that it's also for us, it is a big challenge to set up this tool. I mean, we've taken also more or less two weeks to do it and are still adapting it going further. So I mean, this is also something that shows how difficult it is to set up a booking platform that really works. But what we thought is that while we have already a tool in place which works well, also on an international basis with 43 languages so working also from one country to another, from one language to the other. But as regards cost, yeah, this is a challenge because, well, everything is relative. If you look at a crisis like we are seeing now. But let's not forget that the tourism sector has been really afflicted by two years of COVID and the tourism sector and the hospitality and hotel sector accommodation sector has been among the really worst affected from from an economic point of view, even if there have been subsidies in place and state government, government help. But still accommodation providers have been, have suffered a lot and this is why we also thought, Well, how can we, on one hand, make our tool available to refugees and to accommodation providers who want to help but who maybe cannot really afford to offer a great number of rooms for free? So this is the reason why we offer the possibility to offer free rates, but also heavily reduced rates. Yeah. And then we've heard how many rooms are needed, how many refugees are looking for shelter, even if it's only a temporary one. And well what may be a challenge, is also that we thought, what if we if there's a lot of offer on our website and hotels get overwhelmed by accommodation providers get overwhelmed by requests? So this made us decide to make available the booking window only for three days so bookings can be made three days in advance in order not to have a lot of rooms blocked and then maybe canceled as we see also a greater cancelation rate as with normal rates. So this is one of the challenges, but I like what Felix just said that this is really also a very a great initiative where we can see that there's so much willingness to help around not competing but working alongside each other. However, I think a challenge is also to get the initiatives to the ones who need it most; the refugees. And therefore, I am really grateful also to that we are part of Alliance4Ukraine and thank you to Nils because I think these initiatives where what provide us, who want to help are brought together with NGOs who are the ones maybe more in contact with refugees so everybody can find their place in a way and work together. So initiatives like yours are really important and we're happy to be part of it.
Jon Hazan [00:39:44] Thank you Alexandra. I know that time is marching on. But Michael, I just wanted to, before, Michael and Preben before we move on to the next question, you already alluded to perhaps the greatest challenge, which is that of scale, the scale of the problem. And I think you're right, the appeal is from all rooms. But is there anything you wanted to add to that before we move on to our next question?
Michael Widmann [00:40:08] Listen whenever you set up initiative, you have a myriad of problems. The sense of life is problem solving and in such a situation it is, but I think we will face problems on three different levels. We have structural problems, logistical problems and we have practical problems. And then let's look at it from a different viewpoint. Let's look at it from the viewpoint of the Ukrainian family, which in panic has to move out and wants to go, there's thousands of initiatives, but at least on the short term when you move out, you know it's very difficult to think about Ukraine. You speak only maybe Ukrainian, not English, and you have to deal with some family in panic and then you have to look into every country has a different solution. Every country has different things, mostly in local language, only now, some are coming up in Ukrainian and in Russian. But I think looking it from a point, a bigger point that Putin misjudged the response of the Ukrainians, but he also misjudged the unity of the European Union and the global community. However the response is again very fragmented. It's our strength, and it's also our weakness. So when we come to long term accommodation, this is perfect because when you go to Berlin, they look for long term things it's perfect. But then you're on the run and you go through two different countries if you have to speak to three different organizations. It's a nightmare. So what is for us very frustrating is that it's very difficult to work together with the local hotel federations. They want to push their own ideas and focus only on their own things for whatever reasons. And that is sometimes sad. They cannot build up a more robust international response. That is one of the results. We had no other choice, but 90 percent of the supply we have on our website is through the global international chains. We were actually much more expecting to have support from individual providers. But the hotel federations of regions, cities, countries all very much keeps this under the lid and I think this is the wrong approach on this listing, if I may be critical in such a situation. Secondly, the logistical thing, it's something we are simply overwhelmed. We had, Preben mentioned that, on a certain day, suddenly some of our system didn't work anymore because what we didn't know is it was limited to 50,000 emails per day. So the sheer number, the amount of of space we need in the cloud now, it's staggering the figures. And even with all the expectation of the scale, it's overwhelming and we are scrambling to get along. And if even such a major organization like Booking.com has some challenges with building up something and doing it, you can imagine with a very small organization. It's often not easy and Preben has not slept many nights in the last two weeks. And finally, on a certain level, we also have to realize we ran into countless practical problems. People are abusing the system. You know, you have great, you have hotels which contribute rooms in Mauritius and sends a surprise to people to whom may not really be refugees. So, so it is sometimes, you have medical emergencies in hotels and hotels calling us up and now be legally responsible. And so we're running into thousands and thousands of problems on the local level, which are practical problems. Sometimes also, I think we have to tell people who want to help. No system is perfect. If you want to have a system which prevents abuse, you cannot do anything. So we need to accept that when we help 100,000 people that there are maybe two or three hundred, which should not have been helped by the system and you cannot avoid it. And I think that's true for the Social Security system, that's true for health care. And that's true for a refugee situation. I think a certain acceptance that no system is perfect would help us a long way. But I guess the expectation is always to ourselves, but from ourselves that everything must run always smoothly and almost perfect. No, we cannot provide that. If you screw up, people screw up and that's life and you need to if you can make some lives better. Maybe a lot of lives better a little bit, then I think you have accomplished the thing and that's my point. And I think Preben can add to that probably, his sleepless nights.
Jon Hazan [00:45:40] Thank you, Michael. Preben, do please.
Preben Vestdam [00:45:44] Yeah, it's true. The first two weeks were, there was not a lot of sleep. I think we took the decision to launch as fast as possible, but it was definitely not pretty. 48 hours. You cannot make it pretty. As as Jan mentioned, I think just examples that you're sending out emails which are standard answers to thank you for your reservation or something in your normal system and it ends up with I hope you will have a wonderful holiday and it doesn't really, it's not that appropriate to this. But we decided just to launch it anyway, because the requirement of fulfilling the need which was there was more important to go after than making it pretty and and ensure that everything was tailored. We haven't even sorted out our terms and conditions yet. That's how fast it's going, and we'll get that maybe next week. But it's not about the details, the guide we're sending to all the hotels. There are lots of screenshots where we just put a cross over and we'd say, forget about this, it's nothing to do with you. Go to the next page. And but it's the only way of getting it out, as we did there, 48 hours. It was, it was hard, hard work, but we got people into beds very early.
Jon Hazan [00:46:59] Thank you Preben. It's almost the perfect way to summarize what we've just been talking about in this section, of course, there will be many, many challenges, but it's better to do something no matter how imperfect it is then nothing. And I applaud you all for taking on those challenges. And best of luck for the challenges to come. I'm going to pass over to Jonathan, who I know has another question. Thank you.
Jonathan Humphries [00:47:21] Thank you, John. Actually, I had many questions, but I'm conscious of time and you know, it's been so fruitful. You know, the dialog, the exchange and the information that you've all been sharing. So I'm going to jump to what I think is, you know, a very critical question, which is what is your ask from the industry? And what is your ask from the media that are joining us today? What do you want from the industry and what do you want from the media? What do you want people to do? Okay. And I think, you know this is your opportunity to get your message across. You know, is it about resources? Is it about funds, is it about being united, is it about communicatio? Whatever the topic. Nils, I'd like you to start and then feel free. Anybody else who'd like to jump in? It doesn't need to be everybody contributing if but Nils I'd like you to start, please.
Nils Omland [00:48:19] Thanks for posing the question, Jonathan. So my main call would be if you want to contribute in hospitality business, real estate business or in any way related to possible accommodation. Then we are now at a situation where you don't have to reinvent the wheel and you don't have to make an own platform, you don't have to reinvent all the structured organization from scratch, but you can join or support one of the existing initiatives, some of which are on the call. So that will be my main call. Go and join people who are already doing it rather than creating something new at this stage locally, so your local hotel, you want to participate, call Michael, call Alexandra, and maybe they don't want to be called, but anyway, go to their platforms and get your hotel capacity there or you have an apartment, go to Wunderflats and don't create your own platform because this will only create complexity and more chaos for the refugees.
Jonathan Humphries [00:49:31] Thank you very much, Nils. I'm just going to open it up. Alexandra, what would, if you'd like to or?
Alexandra Wolframm [00:49:40] Yes, yes, thank you. You know, there's not much to add to what Nils said, but yeah, this is what we would like too to raise awareness about what we're doing. I mean, in our case, we've reached out to our accommodation partners. But if, and we would like even more to adhere if they can make it possible and maybe this is also a request to the audience. If you can help distributing the message and raising awareness, that would be great. Thanks.
Jonathan Humphries [00:50:14] Thank you, Alexandra.
Chris Mumford [00:50:15] Can I just jump in, Jonathan? Sorry, just on off the back of that, if you don't mind, I'm just curious about how far afield because you know, do we need this help when you're seeing the refugees move? Because I think a lot of people might think, well, it's immediately on the border of Ukraine and those immediate countries. But I'm suspecting that actually, you know, this wave is moving across territories and therefore we need to ask for help from accommodation and lodging providers on a much broader geographic basis. And maybe some people assume. Can anyone speak to that?
Michael Widmann [00:50:49] Yes. I think you brought up a crucial point now. I think initially it was all on the border countries. And let's face it, Poland is overwhelmed. Romania is overwhelmed. Not much anybody can do about it. Yeah, and that's the best platform. But there's simply no room available. And so, I think the focus is really shifting to other countries, maybe even to as a continent to some degree, I think to take over a certain amount of this burden because it is a logistical burden to every country involved. So I think we need to think about this. This is the second and maybe there will be a third wave. We see now, for example, a growing demand in North America; Canada has a massive Ukrainian diaspora. Yeah, Canada's the second biggest Ukrainian country, so to speak. And so, so you see, suddenly we have substantial demand now in France. We unfortunately don't have a lot of supply available in Scandinavia, but there's a growing demand in Scandinavia. But we have seen numbers picking up in places and we have a lot of African hotels who have taken a considerable amount of refugees. It's amazing. It's not just Ukrainian citizens. Also, people, students who are from Africa who studied there it was very important for us that we don't discriminate because let's face it, one of the early criticisms to any help was, well, you are helping the blond, blue eyed Ukrainians. Why don't you help the Afghan and Syrian refugees? And I think it's a fair criticism to a certain degree. You have to look a little bit in the mirror. Are you always as helpful as we are now? And so I think we need to address wider problems in the world. But you cannot assume all problems of the world at the same time. So we focus on this initiative. But it was important not to make discriminations and even with this initiative, because that has been reported as well in some instances. So let's face it, I think the wave we need to distribute on a wider scale. So I think that's what Alexandra also alluded to going from 10-12 countries to 20 countries, we are now active in more than 50 countries. And I see it going to 60-70 countries in the next one or two weeks, and that is necessary. It is really necessary. It's like a pressure valve. We need to open this pressure valve a little bit and let the people move to places that, which are not overwhelmed and where there is also a lot of willingness. I think this is a great thing. It's almost a global effort to help and the willingness to help. And it's a good moment for humanity in one of the worst moments of humanity. Yeah? I'm chairman and looking at the history and the guilt of Germany in causing two world wars, especially the second one. And the question was why did nobody help the Jewish refugees? And this one of the things, you know, it's almost now looking back in history. Unbelievable that the people were turned away from almost all countries. I think, you know, not letting history repeat itself and not turning a blind eye on this situation is a proud achievement of all of us. And but I think it has to be almost a global effort, and that's where I think the initiatives must move beyond the local level to a global level.
Jonathan Humphries [00:54:32] OK, thank you very much, Michael. Anyone else call to action for the industry, for the media? Jan?
Jan Hase [00:54:38] Maybe add to that so like awareness, as we talked a lot about awareness, And that's a very important topics for the first people that wanted to help reallt expected, you know, like European looking people and and we heard from from BIPOC people for LGBTQAI+ people that they were turned down at the doorstep as they arrived. So we instantly, for example, decided that there's a lot of initiatives going on like this state owned-help and so on. Going on, we decided to have to only focus on emergency cases, but which were obviously the people that needed something like on the same day, but was also like BIPOC and LGBTQAI+ and also like people that were disabled, that came in a wheelchair, for example, which also was very hard to find places for or people that alre wounded like in the early days. And there were not a lot of people that that came with violence, but or like with there wasn't any other like harms on them, on their bodies. But obviously, it's you cannot put them into a family that don't know how to handle that, right? So, and so you better get a better process to help these people and especially. And I think as a media can help you a lot, not only like showing you like young women with young children as when they talk about people fleeing from Ukraine but actually showing a more diverse picture so that people, there's also men arriving, you know, like and people that are not like that don't have a Ukrainian I.D. or passport. They're just we're living in a country like students or other people, right? So and we really need to point like that diverse pictures of the people that are actually arriving. It's not. It's not only young families and the other thing is we hand a banner where we like "help" and it's like it's giving a lot of energy to do that and to continue on that. But outside of the barrier, I see that some kind of fatigue already happening. So you see that horrible pictures every day and people like tend to turn away a bit from it and they don't want to see it anymore. And we had a lot of private people offering their homes in the early days, and we see a very fast decline in that. And, you know in that urge to help. So, and I think that's also something like to media can also tell people it's they're still needed, especially in the long term sector. Not everything has to be for free anymore. Like there's a lot of, you know, like short term solutions, but we need like affordable, rent a space where people can stay for for a long time. And yeah, that's that's made to make sense.
Jonathan Humphries [00:57:12] Thank you very much Jan. And I think it's, you know, I'm conscious of time. I'd like to bring in all the media because they've obviously been listening in. We haven't had anything come in on the Q&A directly, so I'm just having a look here.
Jon Hazan [00:57:26] We've just had something come in from George.
Jonathan Humphries [00:57:30] Yeah, but can we bring the media in and then George can ask directly. So I'll ask George Sell from International Hospitality Media, George, I don't know if your camera's working, but you can feel free to introduce yourself.
George Sell [00:57:50] One second, guys, I'm just going to put my camera and I'll be right with you. There you go. Can you see me?
Jonathan Humphries [00:57:55] Yes. Thanks, George.
George Sell [00:57:58] Oh, fantastic, what you're all doing. Yeah. I just really wondered if it would be possible for you to produce a press release or a statement or something that neatly summarizes what you're trying to do, what you need from accommodation providers, how they can help and who they should go to to offer their help. Because from the conversations I've been having, I think there's an enormous will to help. But there are also a confusing number of initiatives out there and I think trying to get as many of those as possible into a single source in a single initial contact point for people who then moved on to the most suitable initiative is a really good way to go. So I think simplifying the message to the people who you want to help and giving them a single initial point of contact would be really useful.
Jonathan Humphries [00:59:08] OK. Thank you, George. I mean, I think that is something that we could coordinate with everybody on here, George, to make sure if that's OK with you, Michael and Jan, Nils, Preben, Alexandra. Would that be OK? OK. Sylvie, Opportunity, any questions having listened in?
Sylvie Konzack [00:59:37] Yeah, hello, everybody. Thank you so much for your information about some things I know Jan, we have been in contact for the first two weeks because of Every Bed Helps, the other initiative for Service Apartment. It was very successful, too, but there's there's a little conflict. A lot of people said to you that there's only a limited offering of apartments and it's full, everything is full and it's a, I think it's a big challenge for the next month to solve the problem that we have no capacity for all that. And you know, the bookings are rising now and the houses has to, the objects as to to earn some money. And I think this is of the great problem, how to solve it. Jan you said that you have the next station for long term and visits, but how can we solve that problem?
Jan Hase [01:00:40] To maybe answer directly so that one thing that we did over the last two weeks was to found Wunderflats Foundation Charity in order to collect donations to cover the costs for landlords that cannot afford to reduce their rates or also for the hotels and and serviced apartments industry to still offer a few days as a like emergency instant help. And basically, that's offset with donations. And on the first day, collecting donations, we already collected 100,000 euros in help. And there were a lot of follow on. Talks are currently happening, with even more people willing to donate, especially for that specific reason, for that specific purpose. There was a lot of private people that said: I don't have an apartment, I don't have a room to share. I want to help anyway. So can I just, you know, like, cover some living costs of people fleeing from Ukraine? So I think this will help. Also again, in the transition, it won't be something permanent that will happen or that will need to happen because people also are looking for jobs. So they're not like, the first two questions that we get is where do I need to register. And I want to work. Please help me. Like, where can I work? So these people are highly educated and arriving here and highly willing, willing to work so people, that's what I said. So in the next phase, we don't need like not not only like for free apartments, but it's also OK if you cannot, you know, like offer your apartments for free, but offer it at a reasonable rate so that people can rent it with their normal salaries. So. So that's like two things that we tried to do here. And we're also in touch with organizations also Alliance4Ukraine that offer jobs for Ukrainians and/or for people fleeing from the war, especially in helping with that. There's also great and great platforms emerging here and also from the Syrian crisis and already from before. Yeah. So I think that will help and there's also obviously social and benefits being transferred. So people that arrive here and register, they are not completely without money so the government can cover costs or they can cover some costs. And yeah, the transition is happening.
Sylvie Konzack [01:03:08] Thank you.
Jonathan Humphries [01:03:08] Thank you. Can I just, just to add to what you're saying Jan, Michael what is your view in terms of a call to action for the accommodation sector in order to provide employment opportunities for refugees?
Michael Widmann [01:03:27] Say is, I think, in the double excerts on one hand. It's of course, great to help people here. The other hand, the more people get integrated, the less likely they will go back and so but it's a brain drain for Ukraine is a long term problem. It's a problem we have to address later. But right now, there's a lot of qualified people coming to Europe. And of course, we have to take care of not just providing accommodation, but also providing employment and education, among other things. So my wife for example had set up a platform to do exactly that. And I think that already, if more than 100 doctors say, connected to hospitals, some European countries, for example, have changed some requirements so that people don't need what it's called [German dialect] certification. And it's true for many sectors, including especially the hospitality sector throughout Europe, we have a shortage of stuff. So this is, of course, a situation where a need meets a want. So I think, yes, it's logical. And it's also, of course, always a little bit of the danger of abusing such a situation of paying not enough salary and not fair salaries and all these things so we have to be aware so coming back to what I said earlier. And when you do something good there's also also the risk of abuse. Yes. So I think you have to move from beyond just providing accommodation to many other things and employment and education, medical care are the three major things I could think of, which we need to address and to support. And then beyond that, I think we have to think about the reverse, how can we help Ukraine to rebuild? And hopefully it's the end of a war, at least the start of a cease fire, which is not so out of the question anymore as it was a couple of days ago. So, so it's a major assistance Ukrainians have and at the end, the defense for all of Europe, but they also mostly defend for their own country. And I think they at least have prevented a rollover. And so I think we have to think of this space as well. How can we help? And so maybe also providing people employment here, giving them additional education and then trying to provide them the know-how to make Ukraine maybe a better and maybe less corrupt country after rebuilding. So I think it's a lot of things going into that and we could talk about the long term, but I think that's the right question. What can we do beyond accommodation and there's a lot of room for people who have other great ideas and initiatives and can be connected to such a platform? And yeah, that's the next frontier, so to speak.
Jonathan Humphries [01:06:42] Thank you. Thank you very much. Michael, George and Sylvie, do you have any more questions? From your side.
George Sell [01:06:52] No questions with just just again, to reiterate what a great initiative this can be, and it's shaping up to be, and we've got several different audiences and accommodation providers across different segments, and they'll be very happy to spread the word as widely as we can.
Jonathan Humphries [01:07:11] Thank you very much, George. One thing that hasn't been mentioned, I mean, all of you are investing heavily in terms of getting the scalability of these solutions. You've talked about, you know, enormous amounts of volunteer support. Obviously, the hospitality real estate industry has a lot of investors of all shapes and sizes. You know, I'm just going to throw it out there. Do you guys need support? I mean, I know Nils, you've got supports through different investors, you know, supporters different foundations supporting you like the BMW Foundation and others. I mean, Michael and Jan and Preben, you know, this is an opportunity to call for support as well. If you need it right? To be able to get the right kind of scale that you need in the right kind of support, say, are you at a point where you need that or are you OK at the moment?
Michael Widmann [01:08:11] The champion, yes, we need we need rooms, we need money and we need manpower and we need programmers, we need everything. There's nothing we don't need. That's the problem. We have to start. Mostly, we need rooms. It would be great to have a little bit political support, but that was not forthcoming, unfortunately. So every country gets their own little thing and was not interested in joining any initial international initiative. That was my great disappointment. But it's never too late to change that. So, so accepting certain help say I would be from the institutional organizations, the federations that almost nothing came then. So the big help were the big hotel groups and I think it should not just be the big hotel groups. That's number one. I notice a lot of independent hotels have the database and they don't want to discount that but I think a global crisis requires a global answer. Money is needed in a lot of initiatives everywhere. We don't collect money for our Hospitality Helps because I said it's all free of charge. It's all donated and we don't want to create the reverse, the income stream and it's sad. But we have other initiatives where we need money, for example, house families permanently and need to provide furniture because we take over apartments which are not furnished, for example. And finally, we need almost an endless amount of manpower, programmers, but also volunteers. So we have currently maybe two or 300 people working almost around the clock and we have several hundred Ukraine speakers, speaking refugees who are helping. But we also need people who can help them, you know, in programing and many other things. So yes, whatever anybody, if there's anybody out there who has an urge to help, I believe we have can make you work and I think that's true for most probably every initiative that we have so many sleepless nights now. All of us, we have to run the business in society that I hardly come to to view this business issues out of our 100 plus team members. It's tough working more on hospitality helps now then on earning money through consulting assignments. And as loathable as it is sometimes you have to to survive economically in these circumstances and that is a restraining factor for all of us. And that's basically help is needed in many shapes and forms and whatever you can do, please do. And the best help is, I think, kind words to people in need and lending a hand and welcoming, embracing people, giving a smile.
Jonathan Humphries [01:11:20] Thank you very much, Michael. Nils, before we close any final words? I know that it was started with you and I getting together, having an initial conversation, which was the opportunity for us to create this Open Door to bring everybody together here. So before I do my final close, is there anything you'd like to leave us with?
Nils Omland [01:11:45] Yeah, I'd like to stress the fact that in this crisis, having this kind of cruel times for Ukraine, there's one thing that gives a lot of hope and that is what we find in our hearts. I mean, all that we are here in this webinar, everybody looking and everybody basically everybody out there has found, "Hey, I'm empathetic. I care about the refugees. I'm volunteering time, volunteering thoughts, volunteering empathy." and I really like to point our attention to the fact that while this crisis is tremendously cruel on one side, it also shows what we as humans can do if we work together and can do it if we want to come out of the perspective of love for each other. And I think this is something we can really learn and take with us in this crisis, but also long term.
Jonathan Humphries [01:12:48] Thank you very much, Nils. I was going to close, but I think you did the perfect closing, so I would just like to thank everybody that's participated on this webinar. I'd like to thank Nils Omland from Alliance4Ukraine. I'd like to thank Alexandra Wolframm from Booking.com, Preben Vestdam from Hotel Swaps and Hospitality Helps. Michael Widmann from Hospitality Helps and PKF. Jan Hase from Wunderflats. And I'd like to thank the media partners as well. George Sell from International Hospitality Media, Sylvie Konzack from Apartment Service. And I'd like to thank our team as well; Rhea Watfa and Tala for putting together the support and obviously my co-hosts, Mr. John Hazan and Mr. Chris Mumford. So thank you very much, everybody, for joining us today.