Shaping Hospitality’s Future with Niko Karstikko, CEO and Co-Founder of Bob W.
Niko Karstikko is the CEO and Co-Founder of Bob W., an innovative affordable luxury hospitality brand. They combine the best of the hotel experience – the guarantee of high standards and professionalism – with the best of short stays, providing authentic local knowledge and fully kitted-out apartments.
The brand only opened their first property in 2018, but already runs apartments in 17 cities across Europe, with as many more already in the works. Their success should be an inspiration to hoteliers everywhere and ahead of Niko’s appearance speaking at Mews Unfold 2024, he caught up with Mews Founder Richard Valtr to talk about technology, scaling at pace, guest loyalty and much more.
If you’d like to see Niko in person, you can book your ticket for Unfold 2024 now. The full-day event takes place on 29th May in Amsterdam.
How does technology enable your operations?
We built our own tech that reduces the need for extra staff and empowers our remaining cleaners with apps. It’s akin to playing a game of operational Tetris with much higher efficiency.
And on the other hand, we elevate the experience for the consumer, so it's a fully digitized customer experience.
As a modern generation, we’ve embraced self-service apps, such as taxi and food delivery apps, and all the other conveniences that live in our pocket. But we combine this with an amazingly empathetic customer service – which is Bob – which works like a charm even though you often don't meet him. So guests have this amazing experience as witnessed by the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of guests that have been through our doors.
And then you've got a marketplace. We are a full-service hospitality offering – breakfast, local gyms, early check-in, late check-outs – and we bring them to you digitally through the neighborhood.
We were the first in the industry to fully automate and guarantee early check-ins and late check-outs. It’s much like getting better at a game of Tetris, allowing us to offer those extra hours to customers as a part of guest service, as a part of being a loyalty member, or for a small fee.
How important are loyalty programs in modern hospitality?
We're seeing about fifty percent conversion of customers to our loyalty program. We're very happy with that, but at the same time, we believe that we are only in the MVP stages of the program. I think that there's an opportunity to turn loyalty around on its head.
Certainly, you look at the big hotel players, and they've got a format that works great. But what about us? The smaller players in the grand scheme of things, the individual operators? You've got to look at it differently. For example, we have a strong focus on what we call vertical loyalty. Horizontal loyalty is the easy one; if you have properties in every town around the world, guests can easily stay with you again and again.
But how can we find and service customers who have a reason to come to Berlin five times a year so we can capture that? Point being, I think there's a rethink needed there.
How do you manage to scale so quickly?
First of all, money does help a little bit. We're lucky that we just closed the €40m B round. But we also don't build technology for the sake of building technology. Everything has a purpose.
We are using Mews, and we've built a lot of customizations in our own parallel back end, and that's the beauty of Mews. You've got amazing stuff available, and in the areas where we think we should customize to do our own thing, there's that flexibility to use open APIs.
So how do we look at scaling? Well, it's important to remove yourself from the traditional ways of thinking. It's been the hotel industry's strength and curse, that you go to Lausanne School, you go to Cornell, and you get taught the same stuff.
Big hotel chains teach the mantra of how it's always been done and how it needs to be done, and that has propelled our industry into this sort of behemoth. But in the advent of technology and changing guest demographics, the question to ask is not what a 3- or 4-star hotel should deliver, but who's my customer, and what problems am I trying to solve for that customer? That's been the ultimate approach for us.
And so, thanks to technology, we have the cost structure of a budget hotel, but we’re seeing the ADRs of a lifestyle hotel. We have approximately one eighth of the employees of an equivalent hotel. Seven eighths is covered by technology.
So, what does that allow us to do? We had to do some rethinks – do we really need the front desk? We can provide an amazingly empathetic experience with chat-based customer service and some backup plans, so the guest never feels ignored. We don't need the operational layer. We can empower our housekeeping staff with apps.
Since we can do all that, do we really need all these people and old-school systems on site? What can technology do to not just maintain the experience, but to actually elevate it?
From a scaling standpoint, that's made a massive difference. We just entered Amsterdam with two properties last fall. In approximately 160 apartments, we have three employees.
We're able to do that because we've unchained ourselves from the conventional ways of doing hospitality. We can scale a lot faster. We have less difficulty recruiting hospitality staff because we don't need as many hospitality people.
We can provide extras our customers are looking for and great customer service in a more scalable way, ensuring consistency. Last year, we entered ten cities across Europe yet our reviews and ratings are up.
Different sectors have different requirements, but the main thing for us has been unchaining ourselves from the traditional playbook, which allowed us to scale heck of a lot faster.
How do you utilize data throughout your operations?
We have an independent data team that services different needs across the company. There's one overarching team that we've expanded to areas like customer satisfaction. Our company mission is to create a five-star hospitality experience for every guest, every visit, at scale, while transitioning the hospitality industry into a sustainable one.
To that first part, it's about an obsession with what constitutes a five-star experience and also an obsession with understanding the patterns when we fall short of achieving a five-star rating. We've gone to town over the last five years, going nuts in understanding review data.
We have data teams in all parts of the business from operations to our upsell products, from revenues to our loyalty program, to booking behavior and our conversion from direct indirect to direct... We need to identify the problems that we're trying to solve, and then data can provide significant insights to help us understand what actions to take, ensuring that we're focusing on the right things.
Once you’ve booked your ticket to see Niko speak at Unfold, why not check out the Mews Coffee Corner? It’s a collection of snappy and insightful conversations with hoteliers and integration partners that you can watch over a quick coffee break. So put the kettle on, press the button on your machine or find your nearest barista – it’s time to enjoy a cup of hospitality wisdom.
About Mews
Mews is the leading platform for the new era of hospitality. Powering over 5,000 customers across more than 85 countries, Mews Hospitality Cloud is designed to streamline operations for modern hoteliers, transform the guest experience and create more profitable businesses. Customers include Generator-Freehand, The Strawberry Group, The Social Hub, and Airelles. Mews was named Best PMS (2024) and listed among the Best Place to Work in Hotel Tech (2021, 2022, 2024) by Hotel Tech Report, as well as World's Best Hotel PMS Provider (2023) and World's Best Independent Hotel PMS Provider (2022, 2023) by World Travel Tech Awards. The company has offices in Europe, the United States and Australia.
