The Van der Valks: How One Family Built a Highway-Hotel Empire Without a Head Office

Van der Valk is the clearest Dutch example of a family business that grew big by refusing to become a corporation. There is no Van der Valk N.V., no group chief executive and no consolidated balance sheet; what exists instead is a brand, a shared booking platform and a rule that only descendants of the founder may own a Van der Valk hotel. That structure produced one of the densest hotel networks in Europe, a string of motorway landmarks that every Dutch driver recognises, and a family of hundreds in which each branch answers mainly to itself. This article traces the dynasty from the café to the 2020s, including the fraud case that nearly broke it. It is part of the Netherlands Company Stories hub.

How did a Voorschoten café become a hotel dynasty?

The business dates its origin to 1862 and the café De Gouden Leeuw in Voorschoten, between Leiden and The Hague, but the family that built the chain really begins with Martinus van der Valk, the youngest of 24 children, who took over the Gouden Leeuw farm and café in 1929 after his mother’s death and ran it with his wife Riet. Martinus traded horses for cars and prospered as a car dealer while Riet ran the café; the couple had a dozen children, and the family’s own account is that Martinus bought struggling businesses and rebuilt them so that each child could earn a company of their own.

That instinct, one business per child, is the origin of the decentralised structure. In the decades after the Second World War the children opened restaurants and motels along the new Dutch motorway network, often at junctions where land was cheap and traffic predictable, and the format that emerged, a large restaurant with a hotel attached, ample free parking and a swimming pool, became the template. The chain’s own history credits two of the sons, Arie, who handled finance, and Gerrit, the entrepreneur and public face, with the rapid expansion of the 1980s and 1990s through acquisitions and new builds.

By the time Gerrit died in January 2009, at 80, at his home in Marbella, the group had 56 establishments in the Netherlands and 20 abroad, all in family hands. The toucan on every sign came with the family’s purchase of the Avifauna bird park in Alphen aan den Rijn; according to the family, a falcon (“valk” in Dutch) was rejected because birds of prey had been used as Nazi symbols, and Gerrit judged that a toucan suited the family better.

Why is Van der Valk organised as a family franchise rather than a company?

Because the founder gave each child a business rather than a share of one, and because the family formalised that in 2000 by converting the group into a franchise in which every franchisee must be a descendant of Martinus van der Valk. Each hotel is typically owned by a separate company controlled by one family member or branch, which carries its own debt, employs its own staff and keeps its own profit. What the hotels share is the brand, the toucan, a central reservation and loyalty platform, purchasing arrangements and, since the 2010s, the Valk Exclusief premium collection.

The advantages are considerable. Decisions are taken by the person who owns the building, so a Van der Valk hotel can add a wing, a wellness centre or a restaurant concept without a head-office approval cycle. Failure is contained: if one hotel struggles, the others are not liable. And succession is handled locally, hotel by hotel, which is why the family can say that the fourth generation has taken over from the third, the fifth is active in some hotels and the first member of the sixth generation has recently been born, without any single transfer of control having to happen.

The disadvantages are the mirror image. There is no group balance sheet to borrow against, no single body that can enforce standards or discipline a branch that cuts corners, and no obvious way for the family to speak with one voice to regulators, banks or the press. The 1990s showed what that could cost. Compared with the Brenninkmeyers’ tightly governed Cofra structure, Van der Valk is a federation rather than a firm.

What happened in the 1982 kidnapping of Toos van der Valk?

In 1982 Toos van der Valk, Gerrit’s wife, was kidnapped by an Italian criminal gang and held for 21 days until a ransom of about 13 million guilders was paid and she was released. The episode preceded the better-known kidnapping of Freddy Heineken by a year and, like it, marked the family as a visible target of its own wealth.

The kidnapping has a direct business dimension. The hotels were, and are, cash-intensive operations in which the owners are personally present, and the family’s visibility on every motorway made its members easy to identify. After 1982 the family became more guarded, and some of the secrecy that later complicated its dealings with tax authorities had its roots in a legitimate concern for safety. The Dutch press of the 1980s treated the Van der Valks as the country’s most prominent self-made family, in contrast to the inherited wealth of a Heineken, and the kidnapping cemented that image.

Toos survived and the family carried on, but the affair is a reminder that the risks of a family business include the family itself. Succession planning, personal security and the management of a public profile are not optional for owners whose name is on the building.

What was the 1990s tax-fraud case and how did the family survive it?

In 1994 Gerrit van der Valk was arrested in a large investigation by the Dutch fiscal police into tax evasion across the hotel group, after it emerged that some workers were being paid in cash off the books and that income had gone undeclared. He was released soon afterwards, but the investigation widened to cover numerous hotels and family members and dominated Dutch business news for several years.

The financial consequences were severe for the time. Reports put the tax surcharge at about 140 million guilders, and the case was eventually reported to have been settled for 213 million guilders, roughly €97 million, with a number of family members prosecuted and the family’s reputation badly damaged. The structure that had made the group so flexible, dozens of separately owned hotels each handling its own cash, was precisely what made systematic under-reporting possible and so hard to police. The authorities’ view, in effect, was that the family was running a single enterprise with a single culture while claiming the legal separateness of many.

The family survived because the hotels were good businesses with real estate behind them, because the settlement was paid, and because the next generation, which took over through the late 1990s and 2000s, professionalised the operation: payroll systems, external accountants, formal franchise agreements and, from 2000, the written rule that only descendants may hold a franchise. The group has faced later scrutiny over labour conditions, but nothing on the scale of the 1990s case. For the Dutch tax authority, the Van der Valk affair remains a textbook example of how decentralised cash businesses are audited; for the family it is the moment the second generation’s informality gave way to the third’s compliance.

How did the Toucan brand spread beyond the Dutch motorways?

The chain expanded abroad from the 1980s onward, first into Belgium and Germany, where the motorway-hotel format transferred easily, then to France, Spain, the Netherlands Antilles and eventually Florida, so that by the late 2000s about a fifth of the establishments were outside the Netherlands. The international hotels follow the same ownership logic: a family member moves, builds or buys, and operates under the toucan.

The brand’s strength at home is hard to overstate. For Dutch travellers a Van der Valk is the default place to stop on a long drive, hold a regional sales meeting or book a wedding, and the hotels’ scale, often several hundred rooms with large function suites, makes them the main conference venue in many mid-sized towns. That ubiquity has been monetised in ways a conventional chain would not attempt: the family has opened an amusement-arcade business, a supermarket, a meal-delivery service and, in 2016, a budget-hotel venture when three grandsons of Gerrit, Martien Heinrichs and the cousins Bas and Bob van den Nieuwenhuyzen, paid €22.7 million through their vehicle Gr8 Investments for Autogrill’s Dutch business, including seven hotels, AC restaurants and Burger King outlets, with a plan for about 20 mid-priced motorway hotels.

That transaction also exposed how Dutch family business networks interlock: the AC restaurants were later sold to the Jumbo supermarket chain, whose then chief executive Frits van Eerd is married to a sister of Martien Heinrichs. Readers will find the Jumbo side of that relationship in our story on the Van Eerd family and Jumbo.

How did the pandemic and the 2020s change the hotels?

The pandemic hit Van der Valk harder than most Dutch businesses because its model depends on exactly what lockdowns prohibited: restaurants, conferences, weddings and leisure stays. With no group balance sheet, each hotel-owning family company had to manage its own liquidity, drawing on Dutch government wage-support schemes and on the real estate most of them own outright. The family does not publish figures, but the structure meant that the pain was distributed rather than concentrated, and no Van der Valk hotel is known to have failed during 2020–2021.

The recovery brought new revenue lines. Several Van der Valk hotels, alongside properties of Holiday Inn, Fletcher, Mercure and Campanile, have been contracted by the Dutch asylum agency COA to house asylum seekers under emergency arrangements that guarantee full occupancy and require three meals a day; in early 2024 COA was reported to be spending about €4 million a week on hotel accommodation for roughly 8,000 people at about €77 per person per day. For hotel owners that is reliable income in off-peak periods, though it has drawn local political criticism and tests the brand’s leisure positioning.

The other shift is upmarket. Valk Exclusief, the collection of 44 four- and five-star properties in the Netherlands and Germany, with wellness centres, rooftop bars and design-led rooms, is the family’s answer to the perception that a Van der Valk is a motorway stopover. Newer builds in cities such as Amsterdam, Eindhoven and Nijmegen compete with international chains rather than with roadside motels. Taken together with the budget venture of the Gr8 cousins, the family now spans three price tiers, a breadth few single-brand hotel groups attempt. The cap on flights at Schiphol is one external factor that could shape domestic leisure demand for such hotels in the coming years.

What does succession look like in a family with no centre?

Succession at Van der Valk happens hotel by hotel: the owner of a property brings in children or nephews and nieces, who work in the business, often from a young age, and eventually take over the family company that holds it. Because there is no central board, there is no single succession event and no group-level power struggle; instead there are dozens of small ones, each resolved within a branch.

The deaths of Gerrit in 2009 and Arie on 11 January 2024 closed the second generation, which had built the group, without any visible disruption, precisely because neither man held the group. The fourth generation now runs most hotels, the fifth is active in some, and the family reports that a sixth-generation member has been born. Family members who do not want to work in hospitality can own without operating, and some branches have professional general managers, but the brand’s insistence that an owner is present in each hotel remains a selling point.

The weakness of the model is the absence of a mechanism for collective decisions. Questions such as whether to accept COA contracts, how to respond to labour-conditions criticism, or whether to build a shared sustainability programme have to be answered by consensus among many owners, which is slow. There is also a limit to how far a descendants-only rule can scale: as the family grows into the hundreds, the pool of capable, willing heirs for each hotel does not necessarily grow with it, and the family has had to decide, branch by branch, whether in-laws and outside managers can fill the gap.

How does Van der Valk compare with other European hotel dynasties?

Most family hotel groups in Europe are either single-owner chains, such as the Hoyer or Kempinski-linked families, or have long since become listed companies with management contracts and asset-light models, such as Accor or Melia, where the founding families keep a minority stake. Van der Valk is unusual in being large, asset-heavy, entirely private and fragmented by design; the closest parallels are in the Dutch family-business tradition itself rather than in hospitality.

The contrast with the Brenninkmeyers and Heinekens is one of philosophy. The Brenninkmeyers run hundreds of family shareholders through a single Swiss holding with professional management; the Heinekens run one controlling stake through a chain of holding companies; the Van der Valks run no holding at all. Each model solves the succession problem differently: by rules, by structure or by division. What the three share is a refusal to sell to outsiders, which in the Van der Valk case is written into the franchise.

Against the international chains the family competes on location, scale per property and cost. It owns its land, which was bought cheaply at motorway junctions decades ago, carries little brand-licensing cost and has no shareholders expecting a return beyond the family. That combination lets a Van der Valk offer large rooms, pools and parking at prices an Accor or Hilton franchisee in the same town struggles to match, which is why the format has survived every hotel-industry fashion since the 1960s.

What can founders and investors learn from the Van der Valk family?

The first lesson is that decentralisation can be a growth strategy. By giving each child a business, Martinus van der Valk created a hundred entrepreneurs where a conventional founder would have created one company; the hotels grew faster, took more local risk and survived more shocks than a centrally planned chain would have. Founders who want to expand into many locations without a large head office can borrow the idea, provided they build the shared brand and platform that make the parts worth more together.

The second lesson is that informality has a sell-by date. The same looseness that let the family grow in the 1960s and 1970s produced the tax affair of the 1990s, which cost it a reported 213 million guilders and years of reputation. The fix, a written franchise with a descendants-only rule, professional accounting and shared standards, came late. Businesses built on trust between family members should formalise before the authorities force them to.

The third lesson concerns real estate. Van der Valk’s resilience through the pandemic and its ability to accept lower-margin public contracts rest on owning the land under its hotels, often acquired for little at motorway junctions before anyone else saw the value. For founders in capital-intensive service businesses, the property decision is as strategic as the operating one. A new generation of Dutch entrepreneurs, from Coolblue to Picnic, has largely chosen to lease rather than own; the Van der Valks suggest that, over 160 years, the opposite choice compounds.

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