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Between startup pitches and late-night karaoke, Alex and Matthew met CEO Niko Karstikko and experienced a brand built for the grown-up Airbnb generation: tech-led, design-driven, and globally ambitious.

Ahead of Howard Kennedy’s return to Bob W and SLUSH in November, we sat down with COO Jeremy Slater to unpack Bob W’s journey, its edge and what’s next for the future of travel.

Bob W stands for ‘Best of Both Worlds’. What inspired that concept, and how does it reflect the needs of a generation that’s grown up with Airbnb?

It started in the 2010s, when Airbnb was becoming ubiquitous, and not just a niche platform. Enterprising hosts started to realise that they could do this on a widespread basis, with a lot of ‘stock’ on Airbnb. Nico, one of our founders, was very much your traditional Airbnb host, and he took great pride in messaging his guests, sending them recommendations, that sort of thing. So he decided he wanted to do that at scale, incorporating his learnings from his previous life working in the hotel industry (their standards, operational systems, consistency etc). He wanted it to be the best of both worlds – literally – the hosted experience of Airbnb, and the consistency and standards of a Hilton or a Marriott.

Bob W is an apart-hotel model powered by technology: reducing the number of people on the ground in the buildings and actually removing the front desk entirely, giving guests the self-sufficient autonomous experience. They check in with a pin code, they’re entirely self-catered, but there are lots of little touches to remind them that Bob W is their host and that they’re not on their own.

Bob W is described as a tech-enabled hospitality business. What does that mean in practice and how does it shape your operations and guest experience?

The simplest way to think of this is that we’re using technology to improve the guest experience, while also making it cheaper for us to run hotels. It allows us to compete with the likes of the Hiltons, the Marriotts etc on pricing.

The challenge we have is using technology while also keeping it feeling like a hosted experience. We’re currently rolling out Bob W’s newest team member, which is an AI Bot which is responding to guests in the first instance. This can be used for things that don’t require human nuance. So, for example, where the luggage room is, or if you can check in early or not. But it’s vital that the Bot not only has our tone of voice, but also that a human is one click away, in case the question does demand more thought, like recommendations or complaints.

With 45 buildings across 18 cities and 10 countries, you have been scaling at incredible pace! What have been the biggest lessons in scaling across diverse markets and how do you maintain brand consistency while staying locally authentic?

The biggest challenge is ensuring a personalised guest experience. The second biggest is scaling rapidly in an industry – operational real estate – that historically does not scale fast. Real estate is a slow-moving industry, from negotiating the lease to opening doors, that whole process can be really challenging to do quickly.

We’ve been able to do it because we’ve been quite nimble and flexible with our landlords. Our model is just to fill the space with as many usable rooms and apartments as possible, with digital pin pads on the doors – that’s it. No F & B, no swimming pools or pointlessly large marble lobbies.

The simplicity of our floor plate and our business model has enabled landlords to work with us and execute quickly. We have a blueprint for all the different finishing touches that go into a Bob W building, like the ironmongery or the joinery, but we also do a design concept that nods to the local neighbourhood in some way, whether it’s sourcing local artworks or furniture, but we’re not having to rewrite the playbook every time.

We also have the same things in the rooms – what we like to call our critical non-essentials, so adaptors, chargers, reusable water bottles, yoga mats, things like that.

Finland now represents only a tenth of your business. How do you approach risk management and market selection in a volatile hospitality landscape?

The short answer is that we have an amazing team that spends a lot of time on feasibility and looking at new markets and making sure that we’re not cannibalising our existing stock.

When we look at new deals outside of our existing markets, that’s where we need to be really selective with the buildings we take. The costs of entering new markets is significant, so we have to have a very structured underwriting process before we enter markets.

Bob W aims to ‘create change’ rather than just participate in it. What traditional hospitality models are you challenging, and what does disruption look like from your perspective?

The main way that we are different from traditional Airbnbs or hotels is that you don’t need to worry about not being able to access your keys in a lockbox – it’s all accessible via a pin pad.

And even if we are competing on a micro level with hotels, if someone is looking for more space, or a kitchenette, they will choose us. But we’re taking a lot of learnings from our competitors too.

While we’re never going to be able to compete with somewhere like the Four Seasons, we can incorporate some of their key entrance experiences into our welcome. So if you’ve stayed with us before, you’ll get a message saying, ‘welcome back, we can’t wait to host you again’, just as you might at the reception desk of the hotel if you’re a repeat visitor.

How do you balance automation and digital services with the human touch that guests still crave?

It’s a really fine balance. Obviously, we automate some communications – so once they’ve booked we will send a booking confirmation, and once they’ve checked in, they’ll get a Whatsapp saying we can’t wait to host you, here are the details of your check in.

But we don’t overload them with comms. We keep it to the bare essentials, and so that they know how to contact us.

Then when they do get in touch, we have very ambitious response times. If there isn’t a front desk or a landline phone in your room, we need to make sure that they are getting an even quicker response than they would usually.

We aim for Bob W to get you an answer within 10 minutes of a Whatsapp. If your room is too hot or the oven isn’t working, the last thing you want is an automated message saying we’ll get back to you in 72 hours.

Can you tell us what’s next for Bob W, either in terms of product innovation, new markets, or partnerships?

We’ve got some exciting new launches. We are doubling down on Germany, opening in Dortmund and Stuttgart, with more buildings in Munich too.

We are always looking for new locations to open, both in existing markets and new markets within Europe.

On the product innovation side, we are training the Bob W bot, and we are also rolling out mass personalisation at scale.

So for example, using your WhatsApp name, recognising if you’ve stayed with us before, and giving useful recommendations.

So for example, we’ll message you to say, ‘it’s rainy today in Finland, make sure you bring an umbrella.’ Or, ‘we know that you love the Stoopwafel that we give guests in Amsterdam, so we’ve left you four’.

And looking more broadly, how do you see the hotel industry evolving over the next five years—and what role will Bob W play in shaping that future?

The real hospitality of people serving other people isn’t going anywhere. I think people will become more demanding with how responsive we are, how we deal with their stay, and the level of service we provide for them.

Expectations will get higher, because guests will become savvy to the fact that all hotels are leveraging technology in some way or another.

With the awareness that this will reduce costs, the expectation from guests will be a higher level of service and value for money.

That’s a core fundamental of any service industry, and I don’t think that it’s going anywhere, even with AI taking over the world.

Want to learn more about the outlook for the hospitality industry? Download our latest On the EDGE: Hospitality trends in 2026 report.