Cloudbeds — Customer Support — Laurens Borrey

Application — Director of Customer Support

You power the world’s most ambitious hoteliers. I was one of them.

Five years as the final escalation point for a nine-property hospitality group across two countries, and before that a 20+ person distributed SaaS support team I was promoted to lead within two months. I understand what unresolved downtime costs an operator — in revenue, in reviews and in trust — because I have carried that cost myself.

Laurens Borrey · Belgian — EU work rights · open to Europe or North America
9
properties operated across Mexico & Colombia
3 cities
in our first 3 years — a world-first for community colivings
40 staff
distributed customer-facing teams, Spanish & English
$800K
raised across two rounds (2023 · 2024)
300+
Google reviews at 4.7–4.8
The role, mapped

What you asked for. What I bring.

You asked for
Leading customer support for a SaaS or software product
I bring
At Pathable, a US events-software company, I was promoted to lead a 20+ person distributed, customer-facing support team within two months of joining — remote, across time zones, serving US and Canadian customers during live events, where a failure is visible to thousands of attendees simultaneously and cannot be deferred to the following day. Later, at Travel404, I was the support desk for every property I had taken live.
You asked for
Proven people leadership of distributed, customer-facing teams
I bring
Manager of managers today: three property managers plus the marketing, social-media and accounting leads report to me directly — 40 staff underneath, across two countries. Hiring, performance standards, growth paths, and the hard conversations. Before that: promoted to lead a 20+ person fully-remote support team at a US SaaS within two months of joining.
You asked for
Crisis management, escalation handling and fixing root causes
I bring
Final escalation point for five years across nine properties — every outage, double-booking, failed payment and escalated guest complaint resolved through me. I built the operating playbooks that let three cities run to one standard, and fixed the causes that generated repeat problems rather than staffing up to absorb them. The proof they hold: Maka Hostel plus 5 tourism properties run day-to-day by a manager, not by me.
You asked for
Data-driven: KPIs, dashboards, early intervention on at-risk projects
I bring
Occupancy, ADR, extension-rate and CSAT dashboards I build myself — increasingly through AI agents: automated reconciliation across PMS, banks and ad platforms, and anomaly detection that catches revenue discrepancies before month-end. Your AI-first direction is my daily practice, not an aspiration.
You asked for
Own capacity and staffing planning for the division
I bring
I do this today across nine properties: staff and volunteer scheduling, high/low-season demand forecasting, and headcount decisions — with a quarterly investor report keeping the numbers honest.
You asked for
Move fluidly between strategy and execution
I bring
Founder in two countries: I design the framework and roll up my sleeves — legal entities in Mexico, Colombia and Belgium; fundraising; cross-border payments; and 2am go-lives when that’s what the launch needed.
Bonus points
Spanish · PMS/payments familiarity · hotel-management ecosystem
I bring
Business-professional Spanish — my operating language with staff and vendors in Mexico and Colombia. Native Dutch, near-native English (daily working language for 6 years; 80% of guests American/Canadian). PMS and payments: lived in daily, from both sides.
Experience

Where the numbers come from.

Co-Founder · Co404 Coliving
Mexico & Colombia · Mar 2021 – present
  • Grew to 3 cities in 3 years — first community coliving worldwide to scale this fast — ~110 guest capacity, 300+ Google reviews at 4.7–4.8
  • Implemented and ran the full hospitality-tech stack hands-on, as the customer, from selection to go-live to daily ops
  • Manager of managers: three property managers plus marketing, social-media and accounting leads report to me — 40 staff underneath, in Spanish and English
  • Capacity and staffing planning across 9 properties: seasonal demand forecasting, headcount decisions, quarterly investor reporting
  • Raised $800K across two rounds; run legal entities in Mexico, Colombia and Belgium
Founder · Travel404
2026 · acquired
  • Built a booking-engine SaaS (web embeds + mobile app), onboarded 10+ properties in the first month myself — the vendor side of the exact handoff this role owns — and the company was acquired
Founder & CEO · Maka Hostel
Oaxaca, Mexico · May 2023 – present
  • Own and direct (not day-to-day manage) a hostel plus 5 tourism properties — finances, marketing, and the manager who runs it
Support Specialist → Team Lead · Pathable
Remote, US company · Jun 2020 – Aug 2021
  • Online conference platform; promoted to lead a 20+ person distributed support team within 2 months of joining
The honest part

Why a founder-operator instead of a career support director?

Because your charter is org-building — get leadership in place, install rigor, own the metrics — and that’s what founders do from zero. I run managers today, plan capacity across nine properties, and answer to investors quarterly. And what career onboarding directors can’t offer: I’ve sat on the customer’s side of every onboarding failure mode you’re hiring to fix — the channel-mapping error discovered after go-live, the training that didn’t stick, the handoff where context died. That asymmetry is hard to hire, and it’s precisely what “maniacal about customer experience” demands.

And your AI ambition isn’t abstract to me: I run my properties on AI agents I built — reconciliation, anomaly detection, reporting — which is also why I have a clear view of where AI genuinely serves a guest and where it merely delays the person who could have resolved the issue.

Two points I would rather state myself than have you discover later. Counting from Pathable I am approximately six years in, not the eight the posting specifies, and the support organisation I led numbered 20+ people, not 66.

Next step

Support that keeps customers. Let’s talk.

Available across European and North American time zones.

Dutch (native) · English (near-native) · Spanish (business-professional) · Bachelor of Civil Engineering, Thomas More University, Belgium