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When Jack Bowcott first entered the hospitality technology space, he was building a dating app for backpackers. That unconventional starting point would eventually lead him to found Goki, a company that has processed over 100 million mobile key opens, and later Portal, a platform reimagining how buildings themselves function in an increasingly digital world.
The journey from a social network for travelers to pioneering app-native guest access is a reminder about innovation: the best solutions often emerge from unexpected places. What began as a marketing tool to encourage app downloads evolved into a comprehensive platform addressing one of hospitality's most persistent challenges: the friction between digital commerce and physical access.
Today, Jack is tackling an even bigger challenge: upgrading the infrastructure of buildings themselves to meet the expectations of a world that increasingly demands seamless, digital-first experiences without sacrificing the human touch that makes hospitality special.
The origin story of Goki is anything but conventional. The company started as a "Tinder for travelers" style application designed to help backpackers connect with others staying at the same hostel. It had a mobile check-in function but that wasn't the product, it was simply a clever way to avoid paying for Facebook ads to drive app downloads.
"We were encouraging backpackers to be more social initially, but we quickly discovered a kind of higher ceiling," Jack explains. "The bigger problem wasn't really this side of the counter, the guest side of the reception counter. It was really on the other side."
Watching hostel staff perform repetitive tasks day after day, Jack and his team recognized that operational efficiency was a far more compelling problem than encouraging already-social backpackers to meet each other. This observation led to a fundamental question: what does the complete guest journey look like, and how can technology remove friction at every step?
The answer required closing the loop on check-in, payment, and key distribution — all before arrival. This vision led to discussions with Design and Industry, an industrial design agency known for projects ranging from submarines for James Cameron's Titanic expeditions to barbecues for Heston Blumenthal.
Goki evolved into a comprehensive platform handling three core areas of hotel automation: guest check-in, room access, and communication during stays. The system now processes over four million door opens every month across hotels worldwide. But as the company grew, so did the recognition of its limitations.
The hardware constraint proved to be the most significant barrier to scale. Manufacturing, inventory management, shipping, and installation are capital-intensive operations that don't scale the way software does. Every lock costs between $750 and $1,000, making a 500-room hotel deployment a half-million-dollar decision.
Adjacent market demand kept pulling the company in new directions. Student housing operators, build-to-rent developers, and other property types faced the same fundamental problems of legacy locks, fragmentation, and poor user experiences, but Goki's hospitality-focused product didn't quite fit their needs.
These constraints led to the creation of Portal, a platform that focuses purely on access infrastructure and works with any device, not just Goki's own hardware. The shift represents a move from making hotels smart to making any building or space smart.
"What we're doing with Portal is we're trying to focus on building problems because they're universal, and they're massive problems that need solving," Jack notes. "Every building in the world needs access controls."
The reality of building infrastructure presents a formidable challenge. Most buildings are equipped with what Jack calls "dumb locks." These mechanical locks are incredibly robust and can last decades, but they can't facilitate contactless experiences or integrate with modern property management systems.
Three major barriers prevent widespread modernization:
Portal's approach mirrors what Square did with payments. Instead of rebuilding point-of-sale terminals, Square retrofitted a smart device to make payments contactless. Similarly, Portal retrofits legacy locks with what they call an "API connector,” which is a small chip installed inside existing locks that makes them function like modern cloud-based API locks.
"Rather than saying to hospitality operators, you’ve got to buy expensive new tills, they just created that terminal point that spoke to the till," Jack explains. "That's exactly what we do."
When COVID-19 hit, many hotels were either closed or operating with skeleton staff. This created an unusual design constraint that would ultimately improve the product: locks needed to be installable by anyone, not just locksmiths.
"Constraint is a good thing, and I think the pandemic helped us in that respect," Jack reflects. "I can say now that I believe our locks are the easiest locks to install on the market."
The pandemic also accelerated a shift in guest expectations. Everyone became accustomed to scanning QR codes to check in everywhere. What might have taken years of gradual adoption happened in months out of necessity.
But the design process wasn't without its missteps. Inspired by Iron Man's arc reactor, the first generation of Goki's smart locks featured removable discs that served as the "brain" of the lock. While visually striking, the design proved problematic when housekeeping staff clumsily removed and re-seated the discs for charging, creating connectivity issues that locked guests out of their rooms.
"What started off as a super cool idea, actually, there's gotta be a level of dullness in hardware design," Jack admits. "Boring but bulletproof has become a bit of a mantra at Goki, whereas clever but fragile might have been how you describe the Iron Man iteration."
Today's Smart Lock Pro has the disc hardwired in place. It can't be removed. The lesson: in hardware design for critical infrastructure, reliability trumps cleverness.
When building physical devices that control access to spaces, there's a clear hierarchy of priorities:
1. Security comes first. That's the fundamental purpose of a lock. A beautiful lock that fails is a liability, not an asset.
2. Reliability is second. Locks must work when they're offline and function at scale. With over four million opens processed monthly, there's no room for failure.
3. Aesthetics are third. While design matters (and Goki has won multiple design awards) it can never come at the expense of security or reliability.
This hierarchy informed every design decision, from battery life optimization to obsessive testing and prototyping. The result is a product that may not have removable Iron Man-style discs, but consistently performs its core function without fail.
One of the most nuanced challenges in hospitality technology is determining how much automation is too much. The answer, it turns out, depends entirely on context.
Jack receives calls from motel owners in America who are thrilled to automate everything. "They ring me and they go, 'Oh, I can just play golf all day now. Your system's awesome. I don't have to do anything that I used to do,'" he shares. For a staffless operation, there's virtually no level of automation that won't be welcomed.
But many hotels have built substantial brand equity around how they welcome guests. For these properties, over-automation becomes a real risk.
The ideal, Jack suggests, is what Apple achieved in its retail stores. Technology handles the heavy lifting in the background, but what it facilitates is the removal of counters between staff and customers. Everything feels effortless as soon as you walk in, because technology has freed staff from administrative tasks to focus on human connection.
"What happened there is technology removed a lot of the boring admin-heavy and antiquated stuff and allowed a more human connection between the guests and the staff," Jack explains. "I think that's what we're driving towards."
Jack once stayed at a property in China where every touchpoint was a screen. Check-in kiosks, robot room service, and chatbot concierges all meant there was no human interaction throughout the entire stay.
"As a tech guy, I found that incredibly impressive," he admits. "But also simultaneously, emotionally quite hollow. I'm not sure if that's an experience that would be enjoyed by people outside of technology."
The lesson: automate the transactional and repetitive tasks, but preserve the human connection points. Technology should release people from admin work, not replace human hospitality entirely.
An interesting insight emerged from Goki's early days: guests wanted options, even if they didn't use them.
When the company first launched mobile keys, they received complaints from customers who felt forced to use their phones. The solution wasn't to remove the mobile key feature (and download rates remained at nearly 100%), but instead, Goki added backup four-digit door codes.
"They all wanted to use their phone, but they didn't want to be forced to do it," Jack notes. Simply having the option of a door code eliminated the complaints, even though almost no one used it.
This psychological insight has broader implications for how we think about automation and guest experience. People want convenience, but they also want agency. The best systems provide seamless digital experiences while preserving the option for human interaction or alternative methods.
Building hardware in today's geopolitical climate requires thinking carefully about supply chain resilience. Goki learned this lesson through experience, facing challenges ranging from chip shortages to embargoes on Wi-Fi modules being shipped from the United States to China.
The company's solution was to separate embedded engineering from mechanical assembly. All PCB development, motherboard design, and firmware writing now happens in Sydney, with production in Adelaide. The actual assembly can be done in three different locations.
By splitting the complex engineering work from the simpler assembly work, Goki maintains control over the critical intellectual property while building resilience against geopolitical risks.
Looking ahead, Jack identifies three major shifts that will reshape how we think about access and credentials:
Keyless access won't be relegated to distant five-year digital strategies. This shift is already visible in job titles: hotels are hiring for "guest automation" and "guest experience" roles rather than just IT positions.
Currently, each hotel issues its own digital key, but that's like needing a separate credit card for every shop you visit. The future will bring more unified identity systems that make access as seamless as tapping your phone for an Uber or a coffee.
"That tap for the phone, that tap for the Uber, that's going to be the tap for the hotel as well," Jack predicts.
As guests become increasingly aware that they're trading data for convenience, properties that offer the seamless experience without extensive surveillance will have premium positioning.
The challenge is finding the right balance. Guests must provide certain data like name and identification, but how much additional data should they need to surrender for convenience?
"As consumers and guests, we're going to have to be able to say, what is more important to me? Is it my personal data, or is it removing these friction points?" Jack poses.
The rise of agentic AI systems that can discover, book, and pay for experiences presents both enormous opportunity and significant questions about data privacy.
Today, you can use tools like ChatGPT to plan a trip. Soon, these systems may be able to provision physical access credentials directly to your digital wallet. Imagine being in New York, asking for a design-led hotel recommendation, paying instantly, and receiving your room key, all without leaving the conversation with your AI assistant.
"Massively convenient, no friction. What an amazing experience," Jack acknowledges. "But what have you given up along the way to get to that point is an interesting question."
The hospitality industry will need to navigate this carefully. Property management systems will likely remain the single source of truth and the controller of guest data, with third-party apps like Goki processing that data. But as agentic AI becomes more prevalent, the lines may blur.
Perhaps no story better captures the terror and validation of building something new than what Jack calls "the sledgehammer moment."
Early in Goki's history, before they had even delivered their first mobile key, they were pitching to a hotel group with 25 properties across Australia and New Zealand. Before Goki had even started implementation, the hotel group took sledgehammers to every single reception desk across all 25 properties.
“Basically, their rationale was like, well, based on your product, we're just not going to need them anymore,” Jack explains. “I am being literal here that they did destroy all of their receptions. There was a huge amount of pressure at that point to actually deliver what we said that we could do. There was no fallback option for them or us."
The evolution from a dating app for backpackers to a platform reimagining building infrastructure illustrates that the best solutions often emerge from unexpected places and evolve through iteration, constraint, and close attention to real operational needs.
As we move toward a future where agentic AI can handle everything from discovery to booking to access provisioning, the challenge will be maintaining the balance between convenience and privacy, between automation and human connection, between innovation and reliability.
The buildings we stay in, work in, and visit are slowly catching up to the digital-first expectations we've developed in every other aspect of our lives. Companies like Portal are building the infrastructure layer that will make that transition possible, not by replacing what exists, but by making it smarter.
The question isn't whether buildings will become more intelligent and responsive. They will. The question is whether we can make that transition in a way that enhances rather than diminishes the human experiences that happen within them.
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