Why Short-Term Rentals Stopped Penciling and a Motel Did, with Chalets Hygge’s Kerri Gibson
Behind the Stays · Nov 10, 2026 · 1:11:23
Behind the Stays · Nov 10, 2026 · 1:11:23
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This Week’s Guest: Kerri Gibson, Co-Founder, Chalets Hygge & Motel-Boutique Hygge Explore Chalets Hygge: https://www.chaletshygge.com/ Explore Motel-Boutique Hygge: https://www.motelboutiquehygge.com/en/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chalets_hygge/ and https://www.instagram.com/motelboutiquehygge/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerri-gibson-cpa
Your Host: Zach Busekrus - Journey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachbusekrus/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/behindthestays/
A night in one of Kerri Gibson’s chalets leaves her about $180 in margin. A night in one of her motel rooms leaves $50 or $60. The motel is still on track to out-earn the chalets, because volume makes up the difference.
Kerri is back on Behind the Stays, and she’s the kind of guest I love most: someone who started in a completely different world. She’s a CPA who spent 22 years in tax and accounting software, from an early-stage startup to running the U.S. small professional division of a multibillion-dollar Dutch company, then resigned with no idea what came next. A run-down house in Quebec ski country was supposed to be a renovation project. She couldn’t bring herself to sell it, so it became a short-term rental. It was the first of the seven chalets that now make up Chalets Hygge, which she runs with her partner, Philippe, in Orford. When short-term rentals stopped penciling, they underwrote more than 20 motels. They bought a tired 17-room roadside motel in Baie-Saint-Paul that was still running like it was 1998, and today it’s Motel-Boutique Hygge.
We get into how Kerri knows it’s time to grow, and her clearest signal is boredom. She explains why she brought the motel under the Hygge brand but kept the old name in its tagline, so the European guests who fill most of high season can still find it. She also breaks down how the guests differ. Chalet guests plan everything weeks out. Motel guests tune in on arrival day, stay 1.4 nights on average, and expect someone on site to help plan their stay. We also talk about:
Plus: her value-first newsletter and 10% returning-guest discount, the exercise that helped her separate her skills from her job description, why Lodgify sits at the center of her tech stack, and the best compliment the motel has gotten so far, courtesy of a Swiss guest whose idea of a motel came from American movies.
