Stéphane Reitzer, 58, is not an easy customer. When he meets one of the owners of the new Gogaille hotel in Limoges, where he has just spent a night, he throws everything away. Too complicated, this box to regulate the heating of the rooms; too steep, this staircase to climb with a suitcase… Above all: a hotel without staff, where all the doors open with your telephone? He can’t get over it. “At my age, we expect a certain level of service, you understand”delivers this Alsatian entrepreneur.
And yet, the founders of Gogaille stick to their concept of a hotel without a receptionist. It stems from their model: rooms and a bar-restaurant distributed in several historic buildings in the city center. That’s what they call a hotel “unstructured” – others say ” bursts “. The Gogaille associates have just launched the same concept in Tours, before Orléans and Poitiers by the end of 2023, then Charleville-Mézières. Settlements financed by fundraising from business angels, and by Financière Saint James. Eight other cities are in the line of fire.
Their ambition is to bring a new type of hotel business to municipalities with 80,000 to 200,000 inhabitants. “In these cities, we often find ourselves stuck between very standard offers, such as Ibis or Mercure, or old-fashioned independents”, estimates Sébastien Jacques, 38, one of the five associates of Gogaille, whose head office is in Bordeaux. The hotel industry in these city centers has been especially disrupted by the arrival of Airbnb, its prices, its convenience and its promise of authenticity that appeals to travellers.
cut stone
How to reinvent the profession in this context? The group of thirty-somethings, who met ten years earlier during their master’s degree in hospitality at Essec, is betting everything on the heritage of the city centers of the prefectures. Their target: freestone buildings to renovate, such as mansions or small buildings, too big for families, but not big enough to interest promoters or hoteliers. Their idea is therefore to take over these buildings (three in Limoges), to create each time around 10 rooms, with a living room-kitchen with free access on the ground floor.
For the city of Limoges, which helped Gogaille to establish itself, the challenge is to make its heart of the city livelier
In Limoges, these scattered spaces have a common point of attraction, the bar-restaurant Les Echoppes, which the gang opened in a pedestrian street near Les Halles, and which also serves as a point of contact for hotel guests. Locals also come here for concerts, quiz nights, for cocktails. “We want to be the Mama Shelter of the terroirs”, quips Sébastien Jacques. A reference to the successful hotels created by the former director of Club Med Serge Trigano, which are at the origin, in the 2010s, of “lifestyle” hotels – that is to say hotels where the turnover is driven by the bar-restaurant activity, and which attract local customers.
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