a&o Hotels and Hostels

Company type	GmbH
Industry	Hostels,Hotels
Founded	2000
Founder	Oliver Winter
Headquarters	Berlin
Number of locations	43 (2025)
Revenue	€ 232,400,000 (2024)
Website	aohostels.com

a&o Hotels and Hostels GmbH is a chain ofhostels, headquartered inBerlin, that targets young travelers andbackpackers, offering cheap group rooms and hotel rooms for two. The hostels are generally centrally located, mostly close to train stations. A&O has 43 subsidiaries in eleven countries, making it the biggest privately owned hostel-chain in Europe. In 2024 it recorded about 6.2 million overnight stays and realised sales of €232 million.^[1]

Founder Oliver Winter had the idea of opening a hostel after several trips through Europe in the late 1990s. There were few hostels in urban areas in Germany at that time; hostels in Germany were mostly situated in suburban or rural areas and were run by theGerman Youth Hostel Association; this was a problem for foreign travellers, because only members of the organisation could stay there.

In the year 2000 Winter and his landlord Michael Kluge opened the first a&o Hostel inBerlin Friedrichshain with 164 beds. After a year they doubled the number of beds, and in the years 2002 and 2004, they opened new hostels in Berlin. In 2005 the company opened its first houses outside Berlin, inPrague,Hamburg andMunich. From then on the company established various subsidiaries every year, mostly in Germany, but also in bordering countries.^[2]

In 2009, the company made headlines by winning a nearly 5-year-long Lawsuit against the DJH, the German Youth Hostel Association. In 2005, the DJH accused a&o of illegally using the word "Jugendherberge", the German term for youth hostel, which DJH had registered word as a brand in 1998. a&o objected and wanted the brand to be deleted, claiming that the word "Jugendherberge" is too common to be protected. Finally, in 2009 theFederal Patent Court of Germany decided that "Jugendherberge" should be deleted from the brand register.^[3]

In 2017, the Investment companyTPG Capital purchased the majority of the company shares.^[4] Since a&o has been acquired by TPG, they massively reinforced their expansion plans. The company published a list of 25 cities in Europe, where new hostels shall be opened in the near future. Besides nine locations in A&O's core markets Germany and Austria, the list also contains cities in Ireland, Scotland, England, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland.^[5]

As of 2025, A&O maintains one or more locations in 30 cities in 10 European countries.^[6]

Media related toA&O Hotels and Hostels at Wikimedia Commons

• Official website

• Hotel chains in Germany
• Hostels
• Youth hostelling
• Companies based in Berlin
• Hotels established in 2000
• German brands
• 2017 mergers and acquisitions
• Hotel and leisure companies of Germany
• 2000 establishments in Germany
• Tourist accommodations in Germany

• CS1 German-language sources (de)
• Webarchive template wayback links
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Commons category link from Wikidata