The Place That Taught Me What Hospitality Actually Is

A pontoon on a lake in Guatemala.

A small hostel and bar built at the edge of it, only accessible by boat. Volcanoes on the horizon. And a group of strangers standing on that pontoon, waiting to unload the supplies and welcome you in the moment you step off the boat.

That place, small and remote and almost invisible from anywhere back home, taught me more about what hospitality actually is than a decade of running a UK Top 50 bar ever could have.

The Lake I Almost Didn't Get To

I was travelling through Central America in the research phase of what would eventually become Ojo Rojo. Belize behind me. Guatemala in front of me. Along the way I'd heard about a hostel, bar and dive centre on the edge of Lake Atitlan, only accessible by boat, that people spoke about with a strange kind of reverence.

I reached out to a place called La Iguana Perdida and asked if they needed a volunteer. They said yes. I did two weeks of intensive Spanish in Antigua on my way there, six hours a day with a teacher who didn't speak a word of English. Then I packed up and crossed the country to find them.

I didn't know it at the time, but the people I was about to meet, and the culture I was about to be absorbed into, would change the direction of my entire life.

Arriving

Dave, one of the owners, met me at a port on the far side of the lake. He was there to collect supplies. He said I could travel back with him on the boat. So we crossed the open water of the lake together, moving toward a small pontoon that served as the only way into the site.

The moment I stepped off the boat, I was surrounded. Staff and volunteers had come out to unload the supplies and welcome me in. Within what felt like no time at all, I had been absorbed into the heart of the place. Not received as a guest. Absorbed as one of them.

That absorption is the first thing I want to name. Because it's the opposite of how most hospitality operates. Most venues receive people. La Iguana absorbed them. And the difference between those two things is one of the most important lessons this story taught me.

Dave and Deedle

Dave and Deedle were the owners of La Iguana. They became two of the most significant people I met on the entire trip. Not because they were charismatic or ran the operation with clinical efficiency. Because of what they had built into the culture of the place.

I was taken in and welcomed by some of the freest and most generous people I have ever had the good fortune to meet. It felt like a genuine family. And I began to understand that what they had done at La Iguana was not the standard version of a business at all.

They had built a place where the people around you were the whole point of the thing, rather than a by product of it.

That sentence is the one that changed everything. Until then I had thought of hospitality the way most people in the industry think of it. A service to be delivered. A product to be offered. A transaction, however well dressed up. Dave and Deedle showed me what a business could look and feel like when it was built around people rather than in spite of them.

The Envelope on the Chicken Bus

When it came time to leave, they knew I was travelling with very little money. And they knew I wouldn't have accepted anything if it had been offered directly.

So they didn't offer it directly.

Every member of the staff and every volunteer at La Iguana put together contributions. Cash from everyone. They put it all in an envelope and quietly slipped it into my bag while I was packing up, without telling me. So the final leg of my journey wouldn't be limited by what was left in my wallet.

I found the envelope on the chicken bus leaving Lake Atitlan. And I cried for a good while after.

It wasn't just gratitude. It was recognition. Recognition of what a group of people had chosen to do for someone who could offer them nothing in return, purely because that was the kind of community they had built. Recognition that a place like this existed in the world. Recognition that this was the thing I wanted to try to create back home, in whatever form I could manage.

I had gone to Guatemala looking for research for a business idea. I came away with something bigger than that.

What I Carried Home

Everything I built at Ojo Rojo in the years afterwards was directly inspired by what I had experienced at La Iguana. The family feel. The respect for the people who worked there. The sense that the customer walking through the door was someone to be absorbed into what we were doing, not just served. The staff who stayed for years because the place felt like theirs as much as mine. The customers who came back for their anniversaries even after they'd moved away.

The love that came back to us in the final weeks before the closure of Ojo Rojo was downstream of Dave and Deedle and that pontoon in Guatemala. All of it was.

What This Means for You

Real hospitality is not a service. It is a felt experience of belonging. And the founders who build businesses around that principle produce something the metric focused version of the industry cannot replicate.

The margins might be tight. The systems might be imperfect. Some weeks the numbers might not tell the story you want them to. But the thing that lives at the centre of it, the culture, the family, the sense that this place is a genuine home for the people who come through it, is what actually lasts. It's what people remember. It's what they come back for. It's what makes the difference between a venue and a place.

You don't need to travel to Guatemala to find that. You need to remember it exists. That the version of hospitality you first fell in love with is still available to you. That you can build it. That when the operational noise of the industry is loudest, this is what you're actually supposed to be building for.

The metric will not be what people remember about your venue. The way it made them feel will be.

Build for that.