Founder Story — No. 02: The Campsite, the Caravan, and What Nobody Sees on LinkedIn

There is a version of entrepreneurship that looks good on a slide deck. The vision. The concept. The renders. The pitch.
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And then there is the version that happens in a damp caravan at the edge of a campsite in Tyrol, at eleven o'clock at night, trying to figure out why the drainage isn't working and whether the forecast rain is going to turn the whole site into a flood zone by morning.
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I lived the second version for more than a year. And it was the best thing that could have happened to AWAYO®.
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When I decided to build AWAYO® for real — not as a concept, not as a deck, but as an actual operating hospitality business — I knew I couldn't do it from Munich. I couldn't design outdoor hospitality from a city apartment. I couldn't understand what guests needed, what operators struggled with, or what made a site feel alive versus feel like just another place to sleep, without actually being there. Living it. Running it.

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So I committed to Tyrol. Every week, for more than a year, I drove the two hours from Munich down to the site and back again — sometimes twice a week, sometimes more. The caravan on the edge of the campsite became my second home. Old, battered, held together by optimism and occasional duct tape. Monday mornings I was back in Munich. Friday afternoons I was back in the Alps. In between, I was on the phone, on the road, or on site with a tool in my hand. That commute — the same stretch of motorway, the same mountain pass, week after week in every kind of weather — gave me more time to think about what I was building than any strategy retreat ever could.

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It was not glamorous. The caravan had character in the way that things have character when they are old and held together by optimism and occasional duct tape. And there was something else. During those months in Tyrol, I already knew that I was going to become a father. There were nights when I lay in that caravan, listening to the rain on the roof, running through the problem list in my head — the cabin delivery that was delayed, the staff member who had called in sick, the website that wasn't converting, the apartment renovation that was taking twice as long as planned — and underneath all of it was a quiet, steady thought: I am building this for something bigger than myself now. That changed the quality of the work. Not the difficulty of it. Just what it meant.

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But there were also mornings when I stepped outside, the Alps were right there, the air was completely clear, and I thought: this is exactly where I need to be.

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The work was everything that startup life is not.

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In tech, problems are abstract. You fix a bug. You improve a flow. You push a feature. The feedback loop is fast and the medium is code.

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In hospitality, problems are physical. When it rains for three days straight and the campsite floods, you are not debugging — you are in waterproof boots at six in the morning figuring out where the water is coming from and how to get it somewhere else before it reaches the cabins. When a guest arrives and the check-in experience isn't right, you feel it immediately and personally. When something is beautiful — when the fire pit is lit and guests are sitting around it at dusk with a drink and the mountains behind them — you feel that too.

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I had never worked so hard physically in my life. And I had rarely felt so clear about why.

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Piece by piece, the Pop-up Camp took shape.

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The pop-up camp came first — a combination of cabins and boho tents, each positioned to make the most of the site, each designed with the same philosophy that drives everything we do: the landscape is the product, the structure just frames it. Getting the camp right meant getting everything right at once. The layout. The materials. The guest flow. The small details that guests notice without knowing they notice them.

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The new website followed. Then the photo shoot — real images of a real place, not renders. Then the first team members, hired not just for their skills but for their understanding of what we were building and why it mattered. Then the renovation of two holiday apartments on site, done with the team, hands-on, wall by wall and room by room.

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There is something specific that happens when you build something physical with people. A different kind of trust develops. You see how someone handles a setback. You see who keeps going when things don't work. You see who is genuinely invested and who is just passing through. The team that came through that year in Tyrol — through the construction and the floods and the long days — is the foundation that AWAYO® is built on.

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The floods deserve their own mention.

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At some point during that year — and I will not pretend I remember exactly when, because the days had a way of blurring together — the site flooded. Not metaphorically. Actually flooded. Water where it was not supposed to be, in quantities that were not supposed to be there, arriving faster than any drainage system could handle.

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We managed it. I won't overclaim — it was messy and stressful and required a lot of improvisation. But we managed it. And that experience — the specific experience of something going badly wrong and then being fixed — taught me more about operations and resilience and team culture than any business book or advisor ever could.

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You find out who people are when the water is rising.

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And then there were the moments that nobody tells you about in any entrepreneurship book. The shower that kept blocking — not because of a technical fault, but because guests were using it as a toilet. More than once. When you are running a campsite in Tyrol, sleeping in a caravan, building a company, and about to become a father, and you find yourself unblocking a shower drain on a Tuesday morning for reasons that require no further elaboration — you develop a very specific kind of resilience. The kind that has nothing to do with mindset frameworks or morning routines. The kind that comes from simply doing whatever needs to be done, at whatever hour, without anyone watching, because the alternative is that it doesn't get done.

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That is hospitality. Not the fire pit at sunset. Not the Alpine view from the cabin window. All of it — including the Tuesday morning drain.

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And then there was the family from Berlin.

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A young couple, effortlessly stylish, the kind of guests you imagine when you design a boho tent concept. They arrived with good taste, high expectations, and the firm conviction that sleeping in nature was exactly what they needed. They lasted one night.

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The problem, they explained at checkout the following morning — luggage already packed, coffee untouched — was the noise. The birds. The wind in the canvas. The general ambient sound of being outside, which, it turned out, was significantly louder than their apartment in Prenzlauer Berg and therefore incompatible with sleep.

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They had booked a tent in the Alps and been surprised to find that nature makes noise.

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I thanked them for their feedback. I wished them a safe journey. And then I stood there for a moment, watching their car disappear down the road, and made a mental note that would later become a core part of how AWAYO® thinks about guest communication: the experience you are selling needs to be understood before the guest arrives, not discovered after. Some people are ready for nature. Some people think they are ready for nature. Knowing the difference — and setting expectations clearly enough that the wrong guest self-selects out before booking — is not a failure of hospitality. It is hospitality.

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The boho tent is still standing. It is fully booked by guests who know exactly what they are coming for.

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There is a LinkedIn post I wrote around this time that I still think about. It was a response to the kind of performative envy that social media produces — the feeling, when you see someone else's success, that they must have had advantages you didn't, luck you didn't, a path that was somehow smoother.

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The post said: don't get envious. Get inspired. Because what you're seeing is almost always the end result of a lot of hidden struggle.

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I wrote that standing in front of the first AWAYO® cabin. My idea. My dream. Made real by more than a year of work that very few people saw and even fewer would have wanted to do.

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And behind all of it — the caravan, the floods, the long nights, the blocked drains, the Berlin family, the physical exhaustion — was the knowledge that I was about to become a father. That I was building something that would outlast the moment. Something my child would one day be able to point to and understand.

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That is a different kind of motivation. The kind that doesn't run out.

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AWAYO® is now something different from what it was when I arrived in Tyrol with an idea and a plan. It is a real company with real operations and a real understanding of what it takes to deliver an outdoor hospitality experience that guests return to.

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The path that got here wasn't the one I started on. It was harder, slower, wetter, and more physical than I expected.

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And I wouldn't change a single night of it.

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What started as a battered caravan and an idea — see what it became below.

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I am Marco Höglinger — founder of AWAYO®, building experiential outdoor hospitality destinations across Europe. Based in Munich.

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