The Magdas Hotel is inviting both guests and asylum seekers to share its space  

Taking the idea of social responsibility to a new level, Magdas Hotel in Vienna is shared by city travellers and asylum seekers alike. With two mantras, ‘Stay Open Minded’ and ‘The World in one Salon’, this new travel concept is not only a home for those desperately in need, but also a space to discover and educate on global issues.

"The message we want to state with Magdas Hotel is refugees are welcomed here," explains the hotel's director, Sebastiaan de Vos. "We want to show, that these people want and can live a self-determined and self-confident life."

Designed by AllesWirdGut Architects, the hotel houses 75 rooms reserved for guests and then two residential units, housing up to 25 refugees. Magdas is all about encouraging social mobility, with many of the asylum seekers taking up professional positions as hotel staff.

This is a new type of hotel, as de Vos says, "it is a hotel with a social impact." Different to the creative hub concept (think: Ace Hotel's collaborations), it adopts a community stance that provides perhaps the truest form of a culturally diverse travel experience. The concept was launched with NGO Caritas Vienna in the midst of growing asylum applications to Western countries (there were roughly 626,065 in 2014), and demonstrates how the consumer shift from a me to a we mentality, can find its ethical interpretation in the hotel industry.