Introduction: Turkish company Kepler Club is a newcomer to the airport hospitality sector, a positive disrupter brimming with ambition and a clear mission as to how it can differentiate the consumer proposition. Founder & CEO Ömer Alaettinoglu spoke to The Moodie Davitt Report Founder & Chairman Martin Moodie about a unique accommodation and relaxation concept designed to maximise traveller comfort and convenience.
Kepler Club Founder & CEO Ömer Alaettinoglu’s background hardly reads like a standard introduction to the airport hospitality sector but it offers a fascinatingly personal context for an equally unlikely entrepreneurial success story.
In 2018, the Türkiye-born businessman was working as an investment banker for Credit Suisse in New York City having graduated from Columbia University a few years earlier and then entering the finance world.
Seeking a break from the sector’s unrelentingly gruelling hours, Alaettinoglu got approval from his boss for a rare weekend’s skiing break in Lake Tahoe, straddling the border of California and Nevada. However, due to work pressures on the Friday evening, he missed his flight and was forced to fly to Los Angeles the next day and accept a seven-hour layover at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) – not most travellers’ idea of fun.
“I landed there and I was very tired, I needed to get some rest,” he recalls. “So I wondered if there was any comfortable place for me to rest inside the airport for a few hours. I did not need a cool hotel; I just needed a bed and some space.”
Alaettinoglu asked an airport cleaner if such a place existed within the vast LAX expanse. “She told me, no, I would have to leave the airport terminal, take an airport shuttle to a hotel and then take the shuttle back in the morning.”
Peeved at the situation, Alaettinoglu searched online to see if other airports offered acceptable options. He came across a quirky website called SleepinginAirports.com, which offers recommendations about where to sleep inside a vast array of the world’s airports.
Seeking planetary inspiration
What’s in a name? In this case of Turkish airport hospitality company Kepler Club, the answer is plenty. Kepler is an homage to German astronomer Johannes Kepler, a pioneering figure of the 16th and 17th century Scientific Revolution in Europe.
Kepler invented the Keplerian telescope, which offered unprecedented magnification levels around the same period as the creation of the first telescope. The famed Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion described the motion of the planets across the sky.
Johannes Kepler has inspired Ömer Alaettinoglu to reach for the stars in business
“We named our company Kepler to honour his curious and scientific approach towards understanding the universe,” says Kepler Club Founder & CEO Ömer Alaettinoglu.
“It’s a mindset we strive to emulate within our management – a culture that encourages data-driven decision making; applies a scientific method to problem-solving; and promotes open-minded discussions.
“As Kepler was an astronomer and we operate within the aviation sector, the connection seemed fitting. We feel immense gratitude for the pioneers of the Scientific Revolution, whose contributions have ushered us into the current era of science and technology, empowering us to integrate tech solutions into our accommodation services.
“Additionally, in Turkish each of our sleeping cabins is referred to as a ‘Kep’ with ‘ler’ being the plural suffix, which sounds like an abbreviation for ‘capsule’ or ‘cabin’.
“So it offers a dual resonance and a nuanced naming that allows us to cater to both audiences – those familiar with Johannes Kepler’s work and the average Turkish citizen who may not be acquainted with him.”
“I realised that in almost none of their reports would I find a good solution for my problem,” Alaettinoglu recalls. “Their recommendations were not referring the customer to a specific brand but were more like ‘If you sleep next to gate, say, 22, the carpets are cleaner’ type of suggestions.”
Alaettinoglu duly arrived at his hotel near LAX to be told he would have to pay a full day’s tariff despite only needing a few hours’ rest. Next came the shuttle back to the airport, the security hassle, and the general feeling of time lost in an unpleasant fashion.
It was a revelatory experience, one that Alaettinoglu vowed never to repeat but which seeded a business opportunity in his mind. When he finally arrived at Lake Tahoe he discussed the concept of an alternative to airport hotels with friends who were working in venture capital.
“One of them turned to me and asked me how much money I would need to build my first location,” Alaettinoglu remembers. “I simply made up a number. That friend turned out to be my first investor moving forward.”
The number might have been impromptu but the notion of a flexible, accessibly priced airport accommodation and relaxation alternative was firm. Back in New York he bounced his fledgling concept off a group of colleagues whose opinions he respected. Not only were they supportive but several offered to put money into the venture.
Family support, however, was not so forthcoming, Alaettinoglu remembers with a wry smile. “I would speak to my parents in Türkiye almost every day when I was living in New York. I told my father about this idea and he was very reactive. He told me, ‘You have a great job, you’re getting paid a lot. Why would you do such a thing?’”
Undeterred, Alaettinoglu eventually told his father that his mind was made up to plough ahead with the business. “He thought I was going to quit so he called me and said I should not do that yet but he would introduce me to his aviation contacts in Istanbul to get a better insight of the idea.
“Everyone was very supportive. The people I met with in Istanbul loved the idea and one of them even became an investor in the company as well.”
With valuable mentorship and financial support in place, Alaettinoglu moved back to Türkiye in July 2018. Kepler Club was inaugurated the following January.
The breakthrough came in June 2019, when Kepler Club signed a contract with İstanbul Sabiha Gökçen International Airport, the city’s and country’s second-busiest airport, for an approximate 350sq m space in a previously unwanted mezzanine area.
“We signed as the exclusive accommodation services provider inside the airport until 2030,” Alaettinoglu explains.
With construction complete, the business duly opened in January 2020. Then, within weeks, commercial disaster struck in the form of what would become a three-year global pandemic.
Instead of mourning a lost opportunity, Alaettinoglu simply bided his time. “Although we only had the chance to be operational for two and a half months, we realised the demand was there,” he explains.
Patience paid off. In August 2020, Kepler Club reopened at Sabiha Gökçen, quickly attracting strong demand despite the ongoing pandemic.
Each sleeping cabin also has a personal tablet computer, on which guests can check their flight status, ask questions of the reception, extend their stay, engage in duty free shopping or order items they may have left in their luggage.
“From the point where you check in to the point where you check out, you need zero human interaction so this whole technological concept was very useful to us,” Alaettinoglu notes.
Going global
With a solid base established in Türkiye, Kepler Club’s attention has increasingly focused on international expansion.
In addition, Kepler Club is about to begin construction on a new dual operation, landside and airside, at Kuala Lumpur International Airport after winning a competitive tender.
“With those operations completed, we will become the first international company in the world to provide short-term accommodation inside airport terminals,” he says.
Kepler Club has blossomed from a start-up to a burgeoning success story in impressively quick time.
“We want to be the brand which comes into people’s minds globally when they want some rest inside the airport terminal for a few hours. We want to basically transform the hospitality industry in the airport commercial space,” Alaettinoglu replies.
He recently visited China, where he has incorporated a company in anticipation of opportunities across the country’s burgeoning airport ecosystem.
Alaettinoglu says securing any further capital to facilitate expansion won’t be an issue. However, quality of offer will take precedence over financial growth.
“Because the airports believe in us and trust us, we should not disappoint them. If we do something it has to be a good job.”
With the intellectual and financial capital in place, bolstered by a sound set of business values and a proven working model, the future for Kepler Club looks every bit as bright as those skies Johannes Kepler studied so rigorously all those centuries ago.