Veerle Donders is the Concept & Brand Director at Zoku — a new kind of business hotel created for modern business travelers, remote companies and digital nomads. Blending smart loft-style living with coworking spaces, hotel services, and a vibrant social atmosphere, Zoku offers a unique home-office hybrid that supports global living and working. From the early days of Zoku, Veerle has played a key role in shaping its concept, design, guest experience, branding, and crafting its strong community strategy. Today, she leads the expansion of Zoku’s DNA and concept across its international rollout.

Veerle graduated from Hotelschool The Hague, where she studied hotel management and joined HotelsAhead in 2011 to learn more about guest experiences and innovative hotel concepts. HotelsAhead is an Amsterdam-based consultancy that develops new hotel concepts and business models, which later turned into Zoku. Here, she was responsible for developing guest experiences and was instrumental in developing the Zoku concept with and around its target audience, as well as the brand and the design into further detail. The first Zoku launched in Amsterdam in May 2016, and other locations in Copenhagen, Vienna and Paris followed in the years after.

In addition to her work with HotelsAhead and Zoku, Veerle has contributed to several experience-focused projects, including enhancing the guest journey at TEDxAmsterdam (2013 and 2014), TEDxAmsterdamEducation (2013), and reimagining the guest experience for the Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) in Boston in 2017.