Dusseldorf The valley of the Middle Rhine seems to be fertile soil for an above-average performance of the young German hotel industry. Last year, Jan Bolland from Bingen Papa Rhein was the first recipient of the “101 Next Generation Hotelier of the Year” award.
The Hotel Fährhaus is located 80 kilometers down the Rhine in Koblenz, just before the Moselle flows into the Rhine. Its managing director and general manager, Eike Gethmann, has now been awarded second prize in the five-star Kö59 hotel in Düsseldorf. Margaux Paulin Steiger (Steiger Hotels) and Jakob Benjamin Stöhrer (Hommage Hotel Nassauer Hof) also made it into the last three.
Both Bolland and Gethmann learned their business from scratch. While Bolland was born into a family of hoteliers, Gethmann, who by his own admission was a moderate because he was “stuck lazy”, didn’t find the penny in the direction of the hotel industry until he was in the upper grades at the Görres-Gymnasium in Koblenz. This was followed by classic training as a hotel manager at the Munich Four Seasons Kempinski, including stations in Switzerland and Bahrain.
For almost a year, Gethmann also worked behind the counter in Munich’s celebrity bar Schumann’s. He trained as a revenue manager at the German Hotel Academy in Cologne and, from July 2015, at the age of just 26, managed his first hotel, The Flushing Meadows in Munich.
In the design hotel, he designed a smoothie shop concept and built a franchise company on it. “You have to be broad-based,” says Gethmann today, “no one in the industry can afford to only go conventional ways.”
Hotel boss at the age of only 29 years
Three years later he received a call from home. Frank Gotthardt, also from Koblenz, was on the phone, but better known as the founder of Compugroup Medical, which he has turned into a multi-million health IT group since it was founded more than 35 years ago. Gotthardt had bought the old ferry house on the reservoir, which was getting on in years, later had it torn down and put the new, chic Hotel Fährhaus on it.
Gethmann was impressed by the trust Gotthardt had in him. He also gave up the desire to go to other countries for a while. Back in Koblenz, when he opened on Valentine’s Day 2019, he was only 29 years old.
Among other things, the Next Generation jury praised the fact that Gethmann had soon established a top hotel in a “quite challenging location and at a challenging time”. And he showed courage. In the middle of the corona pandemic, Gethmann and his team opened the gourmet restaurant Gotthardt’s a year and a half ago. The chef helped out at the tables himself in the early stages, and Frank Seyfried earned his first Michelin star in the kitchen after just three months.
An app relieves the environment
However, innovations such as the WingsCoin app are probably more important for the company’s economic success. Gethmann developed it together with the environmental protection organization Project Wings. The idea is simple: guests can use the app to cancel room cleaning for the next day. This relieves the strain on staff, saves water, electricity and chemicals and reduces CO2 emissions.
Eike Gethmann (centre) prevailed against Margaux Paulin Steiger (Steiger Hotels) and Jakob Benjamin Stöhrer (Hommage Hotel Nassauer Hof).
(Photo: Juri Reetz)
With every cleaning saved, a contribution goes to Project Wings, which according to Gethmann is building the largest recycling village in the world in Indonesia. Rheinland-Pfalz Tourismus GmbH named the app “Innovation of the Year” last October. The cooperation also won the German Fundraising Prize 2022 and the Gastro Innovation Award 2023. In the last ranking of the 101 best hotels in Germany, the Fährhaus was one of the “trouvaille”.
Gethmann is convinced that such approaches to sustainability and digitization make companies more resilient. “In this way, you can assert yourself better in a very rapidly changing market.” However, in all digital and sustainable activities, the focus must always be on people, both guests and employees.
The next-generation award is intended for a generation of managers who the jury trusts to lead the troubled hospitality industry into a better future. It is awarded by Greensign, which claims to be the German market leader in the sustainability certification of hotels, and the Passion for Excellence AG of hotel expert and Handelsblatt columnist Carsten K. Rath. The award in partnership with the Handelsblatt took place again as part of the “101 Future Hospitality Days”, during which sustainability, digitization and health in the hotel industry were discussed over two days in Kö59.
More: 101 ranking: This is what makes the 101 best hotels in Germany so successful.