Interview: Amsterdam-based, Edinburgh-raised entrepreneur Charlie MacGregor on the Glasgow debut of his hospitality firm The Social Hub

“Our wings are starting to unfold,” says international entrepreneur.

It represents a pivotal, full-circle moment for entrepreneur Charlie MacGregor when his Amsterdam-based, Europe-spanning “hybrid hospitality concept” The Social Hub (TSH) next week officially opens its first branch in his native Scotland.

The business, which encompasses hotel, extended stay, and student rooms, plus co-working and community spaces, will on April 12 debut the £90 million, 20,000-square-metre offering in Glasgow’s Merchant City. The site in Candleriggs Square, which has just shy of 500 bedrooms and more than 200 co-working spaces, marks the firm’s 18th property to launch in Europe to date.

MacGregor, who grew up in Edinburgh, says friends who live in Scotland have been in touch saying they will finally be able to see first hand what a The Social Hub property actually looks like – although he laughs that they’re probably angling for a stay. But he also sees the opening as a proud moment for the business that he founded in 2012, and says he’s proud to be “coming home… Scotland has been on my wishlist for a long, long time”.

'We believe that by bringing people together, we create a better society,' says MacGregor. Picture: Rachel Ecclestone.

It was while living in the Scottish capital that he cottoned on to how it has a big student population, but their accommodation left empty when the city is super busy with tourists, “so there must have been something sort of percolating away in my head” to have an offering with rooms suitable for both students and hotel guests.

TSH now has more than 10,000 rooms in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain (where its San Sebastián branch has just joined the fold), while new sites also on the cards for Porto, Lisbon, Florence, Rome, and Turin. Its imminent Scottish launch (also the group’s maiden UK site), which MacGregor says regenerates a long-empty city-centre space, comes after looking for suitable spots in Edinburgh and Glasgow “for many, many years”.

He explains that the new outpost in Scotland’s largest city (which was previously earmarked to open in 2023) aims to offer not just swish hotel rooms and student lodgings, but via the latter tap into the next generation coming into the workplace, and help retain business/entrepreneurial talent. Glasgow has a student population of more than 185,000 from 140 countries, while it is now home to major bases of finance giants such as Barclays, J.P. Morgan, and Morgan Stanley. It has also just placed 45th out of a list of 490 cities worldwide, according to Savills latest Resilient Cities Index.

Regarding the Glasgow TSH branch’s co-working space, the aim is that “you've got companies that are either corporates, or locals that work for companies that are just coming in, or you've got start-ups who are looking to grow, to evolve to understand what the next trends are, so there's a very natural mix between these [and students]”, says MacGregor. And he flags the “growing start-up mentality and culture that Glasgow's really got going for it”, plus the ability to bring in locals embedded in the community. “We believe that by bringing people together, we create a better society.”

One of the communal spaces in TSH's forthcoming £90m, 20,000-square-metre offering in Glasgow’s Merchant City. Picture: contributed.

However, is there any danger that partying students and laptop-focused workers might not always be a great mix? He says he started the business, then known as The Student Hotel, in the belief that “students deserve better… we always treat our students like young professionals”, and believes the gap between studying and working mentalities has shrunk considerably.

MacGregor says disruption is in his genes, having been raised in an entrepreneurial family, and tells of how his father developed the first purpose-built student accommodation block in the 1980s with the University of Edinburgh, and expanded this activity across Scotland and England.

“I used to as a kid have to go and help with either stripping buildings out, or putting furniture in,” says MacGregor, who used to ask why all the rooms were created to look the same in every city. He was told that’s just the way it was, while he would go on to notice how student accommodation often had notices up telling residents what they weren’t allowed to do. The entrepreneur was adamant that that “wasn’t the right way to get the best behaviour out of this generation, you need to trust them, give them a good level of design and treat them with respect [to] inspire the right type of behaviour”.

MacGregor additionally says he has grown TSH by raising more than €3 billion (£2.6bn) from investors since inception. Relevant key milestones include Singaporean global long-term investor GIC and Dutch pension provider APG in 2022 acquiring a “substantial” stake in TSC from Aermont Capital, valuing his business at €2.1bn. And in November 2023, TSH said it had secured a €566m refinancing facility with Aareal Bank and lenders including Rabobank. “We don't have an asset-light model like other hotel companies, so instead we have a very strong balance sheet business,” says the TSH boss.

The latest hotels tracker from RSM UK found that the average occupancy rate in Scotland jumped to 68.8 per cent in February; up from 64.2 per cent in the same month last year and compared with 58 per cent in January 2024, while also exceeding pre-pandemic levels. On the subject of Covid he says it made for “probably the toughest two years of [his] professional life” but also saw him forge new leadership skills and enabled the business to run a finetooth comb over its strategy, and believes that it emerged with its hybrid hospitality model vindicated.

In terms of expansion plans, TSH (which rebranded from The Student Hotel in 2022), MacGregor would “love” to have a site in Edinburgh, and is eyeing London, Manchester, and Brighton as it looks to grow its total number of hotels in Europe to 30 or 40, deepening its roots in its existing markets. “Our wings are starting to unfold. And we're going to start flying soon, so I'm quite excited about where we're going to go.”