031: Beyond STR and Hotels: How Numa's Third Model Uses 100+ Automations to Rewrite Urban Hospitality | Christian Gaiser
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Automation will be the next gift to battle uh cost increases and distribution costs and everything else.
We have built Slightly more than a hundred applications to either improve, automate or measure. um physical processes. Ultimately it translates into you know better reviews, lower operating costs. We will have a shortfall of eight million members of the working population in the next like fifteen, twenty years. You need to radically invest in automation and efficiency because otherwise you will not be able to handle that operational stack.
You are listening to STR Global Unlocked, brought to you by AJL Otelier, the show where I speak with the leaders shaping short-term rentals worldwide. I am Simon Lehman and after two decades buying, selling, advising and investing, I've built a network that spans continents and categories. This podcast brings that network to you. Real conversations, global insight, no PR fluff. Let's get started. Over the past decade. Hospitality has gone through quite a transformation. Hotels became more tech driven, short-term rentals became more professional. And somewhere in the middle, a new type of company emerged. Asset light, technology first, highly standardized, yet operating real hospitality product in cities around the world.
NUMA is one of the most prominent examples of that shift. So the question becomes: is this the future of urban hospitality or just one phase in its evolution? Today I'm joined by Christian Geiser, CEO and co-founder of Numa. Numa has become one of European's fastest-growing urban hospitality platforms, combining technology and asset-light real estate partnerships to scale across major cities around the world. Before joining Numa, Christian spent years building and scaling digital platforms, including serving as CEO of Bon Isle, part of the Axel Springer Group. Today he brings that platform mindset into hospitality, helping shape what the next generation of urban accommodation might look like. Christian
Great to have you on the show.
Simon, thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here.
I was really looking forward to our conversation today. Uh, we do a quick rapid fire together.
Sure.
So I'll give you a short question and and you give as short answer as you possibly can. Are you ready for this? Happy to. AI in hospitality, opportunity or hype.
Big necessity.
Direct booking strategic priority or industry myth?
I think it's a very important component of an and a yes and not an either or.
Biggest misconception about modern hospitality models.
That there is a very dogmatic separation between the different product lines. I think that's often just an internal misconception of the industry.
One leadership lesson from scaling a company quickly.
As you get bigger, cannot solve the problems anymore yourself, you have to hire people that are much smarter than you in every field. Uh and uh trust and rely on them.
And one prediction, where will hospitality look most different? five years from now.
I would say especially in this category of uh two and three star hotels, we will see um quite substantial change because of succession topics and uh automation.
It's been a topic for a while. We've started to address midterm living, furnished finder. We've addressed it with technology providers. And now we're going even a step further with your product. But before we go deeper, um I would love to learn more about How this is all came about and where did you start with this idea?
Sure. I mean I should say in the beginning, Simon, that I actually grew up in a hotel. So for the first eighteen years of my life I actually had a beautiful indirect hotel apprenticeship in the wonderful Black Forest in the south of Germany. Not so far from where You're located in beautiful Switzerland. And in between I built a tech company which was focused on driving a foot store traffic for weed headers and When we started Numa, I launched a business together with my two co founders, one who is a tech entrepreneur and one who is more from the real estate private equity world.
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Chapters
4 chaptersSpeakers
1 identifiedMore from STR Global Unlocked with Simon Lehmann
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039: Hospitality Isn’t Ready for the Future Guest | Jamie Lane