<aside> 🎥
Video coming soon — PC will record a Loom walking through this chapter. The notes below are what it will cover.
</aside>
January and February 2020 looked completely normal. Then March hit — usually one of the strongest months of the year for travel bookings — and instead the business watched weeks of gains evaporate as COVID fears spread worldwide. In one memorable moment, Hospitable had just flown a US-based team member out to a hosting conference in Lisbon, Portugal; PC ended up on the phone telling him to turn around and get on the first flight home before borders closed.
The company moved fast: a company-wide 30% pay cut, with no layoffs — and PC cut his own pay by 100%, down to zero, while everyone else took the 30%. Revenue fell from roughly $2–3M ARR to under $1M ARR within weeks.
Here's the twist: Belvilla's whole business was "drive-to" cabin rentals across Belgium, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands — destinations reachable by car, not plane. When air travel shut down, this was suddenly the only kind of travel still happening. Occupancy that had been sitting around 40% shot up toward 95–98%, and this one customer alone was billing in the tens of thousands of dollars a month at the peak.
PC's own summary of it: "The worst business pre-COVID, the best business in-COVID, the worst business after." Once travel reopened and Belvilla's needs stopped matching Hospitable's product direction — and with OYO's in-house engineering team waiting in the wings — the relationship wound down.
More broadly, most independent property management companies didn't survive more than a couple of weeks of zero bookings; individual hosts proved far more resilient, and Hospitable made a deliberate bet to focus there. The 2021 Airbnb boom — new hosts flooding in as people reconsidered how they used their homes and money — brought a wave of new business through the door.
Also in 2021: Hospitable stopped being called Smartbnb. Airbnb, heading toward its IPO, quietly asked the company to drop "Air" and "BnB" from its name — Hospitable held the European trademark on the term, and rather than give it up for nothing, PC negotiated: the trademark, in exchange for an official, custom-built Airbnb API integration. The new name, "Hospitable," was not universally loved internally at first (more than one person worried it sounded like "hospital") — but in retrospect, PC's glad it stuck.
It took somewhere between a year and a half and two years for revenue to fully recover to pre-COVID levels. By 2022, the team had rebuilt to around 40 people — not the same 40 people who'd been there in 2019, in many cases, but a company that had proven it could take a gut punch and come back.