The Modern Hotelier #192: How ONDA is Building a New Model For Experiential Stays | with Bill Graf
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David Millili: Welcome to another episode of The Modern Hotelier Hospitality's Most Engaged Podcast. I'm David Millili.
Steve Carran: I'm Steve Carran.
David Millili: Steve, who are we interviewing today?
Steve Carran: David, today we have a Bill Graf owner of ONDA. Thanks for sitting down with us. Bill, how are we doing today?
Bill Graf: Thank you guys so much for having me. It's great to be here. 
Steve Carran: Absolutely. So Bill, can you give us a little bit about your background and how you got into hospitality?
Bill Graf: Sure. So I studied finance and real estate in college. I started my career doing mergers and acquisitions advisory for an investment bank, and then jumped to a private equity fund. And in both of those I focused on multi-site restaurants and retailers. So think large franchisors, franchisees of like fast food concepts and things like that took a sabbatical quit my job in finance, went to Southeast Asia, bought a motorcycle, had an eat, pray, love for a year. And came back and COVID hit, and you know, I was sitting in my condo in Madison, Wisconsin and turned on the tv and every channel you had was, we're never gonna travel again.
We're never gonna fly, we're never going on a cruise ship. None of that. And I'm going, my contrarian investor brain kicked in and I'm like. You know, that's just not true. We will, this might be a great time to get into one of these industries and so airlines are a no-go cruise ships are a no go I'm like hotels, you could probably buy some distressed hospitality real estate right now.
And so that's what I did. I flew down to Costa Rica for a variety of sort of practical reasons. That's why we chose that geography. I bought a old beat up pickup truck and kicked the tires on every 20 to 40 key beach hotel I could find within a few hours at the airport, threw in some low ball offers, and uh, we bought the first hotel in July of 2021 spent six months renovating, rebranding, building out our brand, and we launched on January 1st, 2022.
David Millili: So tell us about Anda and what is the kind of the mission behind the bread?
Bill Graf: So the mission behind the brand. philosophically, I've done a lot of traveling. Like I said, I bought that motorbike went through, Vietnam and Southeast Asia and, the experiences that I was having, you know, I post 'em to Instagram and all of my finance friends back in the United States were super jealous.
Like, oh my God, how are you doing this? This looks amazing. Right? And it's a pretty low bar for, for finance people working in an office. And what I realized the reality of the situation was to have these really cool, authentic experiences, you, you had to get to the end of the dirt road. You had to go off the beaten path.
Right? You had to go to the kind of places that will never really support a mega resort. Right. And, and, and that got me thinking. It's really interesting, especially in these developing economies, there is no brand. To be in the places that the modern traveler wants to be. These are really interesting lifestyle destinations like, you know, Santa Teresa, Costa Rica Ko Tau in Thailand.
I mean, I could rattle a million of 'em off, and I'm sure you guys have been to places like this, the places that people want to go, but they're scared to take the leap because there's no trusted brand to take them there. And so ONDA really was founded to, build out a franchise system specifically designed for these types of small hotels in lifestyle destinations
David Millili: That's cool.
Steve Carran: So what's next for HONDA?
Bill Graf: So, like I said, we launched that first hotel in January of 2022. It's been operating for three and a half years. Um, a huge testament to my operations team. Um, we have a 9.4 on booking.com. We have a 4.8 out of five on Google. I mean, these, these are the only hotel in Costa Rica with better reviews is the four Seasons, and I think it starts at $1,500 a night.
Our ADRs are. An order of magnitude literally lower than that. Uh, we are a solid three star concept, so we're incredibly proud of the experience that we provide, particularly relative to the value. Um, we've also proven out that the unity economics work, our, our margins are in line with what you'd expect from a branded concept and the ROI and the real estate investment makes sense.
And so long answer short, we're looking to scale. We've acquired the underlying real estate for a second hotel. Uh, the first one's down by the beach. The second one is up in the cloud forest and the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve in Costa Rica. We literally should be hearing back, I think today from the Costa Rican government about our building permits, and we're about to kick off a fundraise for that and the goal is in the medium term to grow to 10, uh, either owned or leased locations in Costa Rica before entering new countries via a master franchise model.
David Millili: So can you take us like when you're on property at an on the hotel. What is that? Like, what is different about that other than the location?
Bill Graf: So, it's a great question being the meticulous finance guy that I am, you know, before we launched this concept. We interviewed dozens, if not about a hundred people in the target demographic to, put some data behind what we were building. You know, this is not my personal hotel, you know, to my tastes, we wanted to make sure that it was data driven and for the people in our target demographics, uh, going to the places that, we wanted to build. one thing kept coming up one word over and over and over in English. That word is the vibe. The vibe, the vibe, the vibe, you know, the room and stuff.
Doesn't matter as much. I wanna go somewhere where there's a, cool destination bar and restaurant. There's programming, there's other cool people, there's a coworking space, we can collaborate, but it's really about the vibe. You know, if you nail the fundamentals in the room of, comfortable beds and, working ac, you know, hot water, good water pressure, it just needs to be very clean and comfortable but that's a place to sleep. I want beautifully designed common areas filled with fun and interesting people doing fun and interesting things, for me to meet. And so ONDA is actually Spanish for vibe which is why we named our company that. Great. 
David Millili: So tell people how they can find out more how they can connect with you and how can them find out more about the brand?
Bill Graf: Yeah. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm William Graf on LinkedIn actually or they can go to www.stayonda.com, which is our website for the hotel, always happy to welcome listeners of the podcast. If people wanna come down, just shoot me a message and I'm sure we can get you guys down there at a, a discounted or eliminated rate.
David Millili: Okay. Well, that does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier Hospitality's Most Engaged Podcast. We're here in Chicago at the ILC CONfab. Thank you.