A life surrounded by different cultures
I was born in Rwanda, surrounded by African and French culture, and later moved to Germany, where I grew up in the university town of Tübingen. It was a very different environment, shaped by German culture, history, and the international community that comes with a university town.
Later, I spent my Senior High School year in Topeka, Kansas. Living in the American Midwest gave me another perspective on people, places, and the way businesses connect with their communities.
I returned to Germany and studied Media Management in East Germany. During my studies, I had the opportunity to spend time in Finland, where I also studied Business Culture Russia. That experience eventually led to something much more personal: I met my wife, who is from Saint Petersburg.
Through her, I made my first trip to Russia. What started as a visit became years of living and working there, surrounded by Russian culture and a completely different way of seeing hospitality, business, cities, and everyday life.
Today, I live in Berlin, a city shaped by people and influences from all over the world. In many ways, it feels like a natural place for me.
Every place I have lived has left something with me. The architecture, the hotels, the streets, the food, the people, and the way different cultures welcome and serve their guests have all influenced how I think about digital products.
That is part of what I bring to ootell.com.
I don't see a hotel website as just another business website. A good hotel experience starts long before a guest arrives at the front desk. It begins when they discover a hotel, explore the website, compare their options, and decide whether they want to book.
My work is about making that digital part of the journey simpler, more useful, and more connected to the real experience a hotel wants to offer.
I focus specifically on small and medium-sized independent hotels, boutique properties, resorts, and vacation rentals, not large chains with their own in-house development and marketing teams. A big chain already has brand.com behind it. For an independent property, the website is often the only real alternative it has to Booking.com or Expedia, and that's exactly where a good one changes the outcome.
Where I add the most value is the part between design and operations: connecting a new website to the PMS and channel manager a property already runs, building a booking flow that's actually mobile-first instead of just responsive, and setting things up so a direct booking creates less manual work for the team, not more. A beautiful website that still needs someone to re-key every reservation by hand hasn't solved the actual problem.
Michael Negele
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