Our story
From a rainy night in Lucerne to Europe.
HOW IT ALL
STARTED
It started with a vision night, 26 strangers, and an idea that came from watching a caterpillar turn into a butterfly.
No, really. Here’s how a rainy evening in Lucerne became five hotels, 150,000 guests, and a growing presence across Europe.
- Most portfolio diversification doesn't come with a free night's sleep.
- Most portfolio diversification doesn't come with a free night's sleep.
- Most portfolio diversification doesn't come with a free night's sleep.
- Most portfolio diversification doesn't come with a free night's sleep.
- Most portfolio diversification doesn't come with a free night's sleep.
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
2026
the beginning
No one had built a capsule hotel in Switzerland. Peter took that as a reason to try.
In 2017, Peter attended a “vision night” in Lucerne. A butterfly metaphor sparked an idea: cocoons became capsules — and he couldn’t let it go. One year later, with Fabian and Joe, he co-founded Capsule Hotel GmbH and opened the first capsule hotel in Switzerland. The assembly manual arrived in Chinese. They built it anyway.
Swiss TV covered the launch. A permit issue forced a six-month closure. People thought it was over. When the doors reopened, every capsule was full within a month. It wasn’t over. It was just getting started.
First real test of the concept. It passed.
The standard
Peter visited a capsule hotel in Vienna. He came back with a very clear idea of what Capsule Hotel would never be.
Capsules crammed into an undecorated basement, a chrome shower box where you crouched over the toilet, and a four-centimetre mattress. Vienna as a city was wonderful. The experience was not. That trip settled something important for the whole team: design and genuine guest comfort were not optional extras, they were the entire point.
Conveniently, the original chinese capsules in at theLAB were starting to fall apart around the same time, which gave the team the push they needed to build their own product from scratch. Working with a Swiss manufacturer, they developed the Swiss Capsule™: designed in-house, built in Switzerland, made to a standard the team could be proud of. Fabian stepped out to focus on his architecture practice, and Peter’s brother Beat joined as CFO, bringing exactly the financial expertise a growing company needs.
The commitment
New CEO joins. The world shuts down. The team builds a second hotel anyway.
Adrie joined as CEO in early 2020, bringing a fast-tracked international career and a long-held ambition to work in hospitality. Within weeks, COVID hit and every property closed. Rather than wait it out, Adrie had a characteristically direct question: why not install the new Swiss Capsules at Hyve, an existing hostel in Basel already part of the group, and see whether the concept could work within an existing hostel? During the lockdown, the team did exactly that: opening what was supposed to be a pop-up, and watching it quietly become something permanent: Capsule Hotel by Hyve. It turned a moment of paralysis into momentum, and gave the whole company the kind of forward energy that transforms a pilot idea into an actual business case.
When one door closes, build a capsule in the next one.
The audacity
Deserted airport halls, a 20-year lease, and a conviction that turned out to be completely right.
Capsule Hotel was invited to present their concept to the management of Zurich Airport. A 21-hour workshop followed, working through what the airport needed and what Capsule Hotel could bring to it. At every meeting during this period, the team walked through empty airport halls where departure boards showed fewer than ten flights a day. The atmosphere was eerie, but the conviction was unshakeable: this was the right location and the right moment. They signed a 20-year contract in the middle of a global pandemic, with no certainty of when travel would return. After construction was finished, Joe moves to Kenya, and Miky takes over running the operations of the hotel. On the exact day the hotel opened in 2021, the mask mandate in Switzerland was lifted. Europe’s largest capsule hotel welcomed its first guests at Zurich Airport, and the press coverage went well beyond the country’s borders. The bet had paid off.
Bold visions have a habit of becoming reality, especially the ones everyone else thought were too risky.
The grind
Open, celebrated, and fighting to stay that way.
Post-COVID supply chain disruptions pushed construction costs well above projections, and the airport hotel couldn’t run at full capacity in its first year. Keeping the project alive took investor negotiations, creative financing, and suppliers who believed enough in the team to extend payment terms. They all came through. Today, over 150,000 guests have stayed at a Capsule Hotel property, and that number keeps growing.
The foundations
Not every year needs a ribbon cutting.
With three locations running and the concept fully proven, 2023 is the year of going deeper rather than wider. The guest journey is rebuilt end to end, the tech stack overhauled, and Hyve Basel formally acquired by Capsule Hotel. The team grows to around 70 people. After years of building under pressure, the foundations are finally solid enough to scale from.
Back to the roots
A new hotel in Lucerne: the city where the whole thing began.
The fourth Swiss location opens in the heart of Lucerne in April 2024, designed around a unique theme with local artists and carrying everything the team has learned since 2017. From the lobby to the murals inside each capsule, every layer tells its own story. Seven years of learning went into building it, and it shows in every corner.
Going international
Copenhagen. The whole team flies in, grabs a mop, and makes it happen.
Capsule Hotel opens its first international location in Copenhagen, and the team does what it always does when something matters: shows up in person. The entire core team spends launch week on the ground, cleaning, building, setting up and sleeping there, because the best way to know a hotel is ready is to live in it before the guests arrive. Copenhagen opens. Guests love it. The concept travels just as well as the people who built it.
The best way to optimise a guest journey? Be the guest yourself (so we slept in the hotel, many times.
What's next
Europe, we're coming. Don't say we didn't warn you.
Five locations. Over 150,000 guests. A team of 70. A Swiss Capsule™ that started as a prototype and is now the standard for what a capsule hotel should feel like. And an ambition bigger than anything the team has taken on before. The next chapter of Capsule Hotel is being written across Europe, with the same energy, the same standards, and the same stubbornness that carried a rainy-night idea all the way here.
Because we truly believed in this project, we kept on saying yes when everyone else would have said no.
The journey is far from over. We’re just getting started.
Come be part
of the story
Whether you sleep in a capsule or help us build the next one, there’s a place for you here.