Hostel Fish Comes to Seattle
Entrepreneurialship is not for the faint-hearted. Ask any successful business owner about their triumphs, and they’ll almost certainly tell you about their failures. For Chad Fish, owner of Fish Hostel in Denver and now Seattle, he knows a thing or two about adversity, hardship, and some of the hard lessons of being an entrepreneur. But the optimism, the perseverance, and the ability to stay grounded are what helped Fish overcome what was, to say the least, an unexpected bump on his road to being a hostel owner with multiple locations.
“You have to look at the road blocks as speed bumps,” said Fish, in a phone interview. “There are so many opportunities to say, ‘Shoot, I can’t go any further.’ But maybe it’s just a bump, and you gotta go over it.”
Having successfully opened his first hostel in Denver, Colorado, in 2015, Fish had aspirations to scale his hostel operation to the point where he could operate multiple locations in multiple cities. “I jokingly would say, at age 27, that I wanted to have 50 hostels by the time I was 50,” said Fish. But what he learned is that the road for opening a second hostel is never going to be the same as it was for opening the first one.
The road to Seattle
Back in 2023, Fish had the wheels in motion for a hostel in downtown Chicago, with everything from the papers being signed for a lease on a building that the owner had defaulted on, to the custom bunk beds made for his new location one block off Chicago’s iconic Magnificent Mile. It was set to be in an old historic hotel, with the hostel taking up the first five floors of the building, while the rest of the floors would operate as a separately owned boutique hotel—the proof of concept was exciting and promising for future operations like it.
And then he hit a roadblock. The owner of the building was offered a better deal by the city—one that significantly dwarfed the one Fish had signed—which sent the hostel’s grand opening to a screeching halt. The 150-plus custom bunks that Fish had built for the hostel now seemed obsolete, and the ramifications of having the rug pulled out from underneath him were, understandably, frustrating.
But as they say, when one door closes, another one opens. The news of the halted operation spread, and it wasn’t long before a building owner in Seattle reached out to Fish about the prospect of opening a hostel in the Emerald City.
“Seattle wasn’t even on my radar until the building owners reached out to me,” said Fish. “I was still licking my wounds from Chicago. I told them, ‘I’m not going to lie. I’m a little battle-worn. You’re getting a guy who has seen some shit.’”
What guests can expect at the new location
That curveball in Chicago, however, helped Fish protect himself when it came to drawing up the lease for the new potential deal in Seattle. He wrote the lease himself, and, to his surprise, the building owners accepted it. Thus began the first stages of building out the plans for his second hostel. Part of what made the deal so appealing—beyond what Seattle offers as a world-class city, with exceptional food and unbeatable outdoor recreation—was that the rooms would fit Fish’s custom-made bunk beds. It was also in a perfect location—in Belltown, with a five-block proximity to Pikes market and an eight-block walk to the Space Needle.
The match felt made in heaven, even if, before receiving the call, Fish was shaken by the experience in Chicago and was understandably hesitant to push forward on such a big project. But it didn’t take long for Fish to fall in love with Seattle and begin scheming ways to expand the hosting experience to more than just providing comfortable beds at an affordable rate.
Drawing back on his college days when he was a flight major, Fish saw the potential for bringing a one-of-a-kind excursion experience to the hostel. Now that the dust has settled, and Seattle’s Hostel Fish is up and running, Fish has gotten back into flying, but this time, it’s on the water. His vision is to offer float-plane trips to hostel guests. Add that to the newly-built 6-person barrel sauna that Seattle’s Hostel Fish offers, and it feels like the Chicago curveball is far in the rear-view mirror.
Hostel Fish Seattle opened their doors on Nov. 8, 2025. For more information, check out https://hostelfish.com/seattle/
