Bob W was co-founded by Niko Karstikko and Sebastian Emberger in 2018. The idea came from Niko’s experience as an Airbnb Superhost and the desire to create accommodation that combines the best elements of hotels and short-stay rentals.
The result is Bob W, a responsible tech company operating in hospitality and the first international climate-neutral hospitality provider.
Our exceptionally cool short-stay accommodation is a smarter, more sustainable alternative to hotels and random rentals.
We are based jointly in Helsinki, Finland and Tallinn, Estonia. We operate properties in Finland, Estonia, the UK, and Spain. We are also preparing to open properties in other countries across Europe.
Our in-house tech platform enables us to connect the interior of our apartments to our operations teams with smart automation, so we went out to market to find a hardware provider to complement this. We were looking for hardware that could help with party prevention, climate monitoring and potential reduction of electricity/heating bills.
We chose Minut, because they offer one simple device which includes all the necessary sensors and a rechargeable battery. This means we just need to install one sensor per apartment with no cabling required and gives us the advantage of low-cost maintenance.
We also found that Minut is future-oriented, just like us.
They offer lots of features within one device that’s very easy to retrofit. We find that their event notifications work particularly well.
Minut provides us with the API and events. All the rest we handle ourselves using our own code. Since starting our partnership, we have received over 100 automated noise notifications from Minut in our internal operations app, which has triggered the same number of friendly text messages sent to our guests to ask them to “turn it down.”
This potentially saved us over 100 complaints from neighboring guests!
The response from guests has been overwhelmingly positive, primarily because we have built gentle, friendly text message automations which are triggered when certain rules are met relating to decibel levels and duration of the noise.
Our guests have already had plenty of contact with their friendly host, Bob, so they are not surprised to hear from him again.
We install Minut devices in all Bobs as standard for decibel monitoring, but we are also excited to pursue deep integrations with our smart HVAC systems in the near future to reduce our carbon footprint and get ever closer to our carbon footprint targets.
The Minut devices are high-quality and have a broad scope of applications beyond simple noise detection. The dashboard and API are a pleasure to use, and to top it all off, the team are excellent!
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