Founded by Willem Rabsztyn and Daan de Bruijin, Bookboost is a data & experience platform designed to help hospitality brands build genuine loyalty. By unifying fragmented guest data into a powerful Customer Data Platform (CDP) and multi-channel CRM, the company enables hotels to move beyond the reservation number, old-school servers and fragmented and siloed communication toward automated, 360° personalized guest experiences.
Background
Willem Rabsztyn has always been a tech nerd at heart. Long before the term became a mainstream trend, he was living as a digital nomad in 2014, running a portfolio of webshops while traveling the world. Through managing webshops for everything from hair styling products to wine, Willem learned a fundamental business truth: building brand attachment and loyalty is more important than the initial sale.
While studying at the School of Entrepreneurship at Lund University, Willem met his co-founder Daan. Daan brought the industry soul to the partnership, having come from a hotel background and worked on a loyalty systems within the finance industry.
The two hit it off immediately, though the university's academic focus didn't always match their practical drive. "I asked the program leader on the first day how much time we had to work on our own businesses," Willem recalls. "She told me none, that I had to focus on the courses. It was very theory-focused, not practical." Despite the academic constraints, the duo used the time to spark the idea that would eventually turn from a side project into a scalable company.
The early days
When Bookboost started, the hospitality industry was famously tech-averse. "Hotels were still primarily running with servers in the basement and didn't really care about tech," says Willem.
The first version of the product was a simple web chat with popups designed to resolve challenges during the booking process and prevent guests from abandoning the hotel's booking page (a tactic Willem had perfected in his e-commerce days). The first real breakthrough, however, came from listening to what customers really wanted to solve in terms of their customer relationships. Hotels began asking if they could use SMS and WhatsApp to handle things like check-in procedures, personalised booking confirmations and guest communication.
By 2019, just before the world changed, Willem and Dan decided to get serious. Willem sold his webshops to go full on with Bookboost. When the pandemic hit, it served as an unexpected accelerator. Hospitality brands were forced to think about their operational efficiencies, and their ability to move to the cloud and finally started asking: What about our customer data?
Scaling the company
n the early days, with no funding, the team relied on the smart, hungry talent pool at Lund University. "I was infamously known for having many interns," Willem says. "It taught me a lot about how to make sure people are effective and in their 'power zone." Some of those early interns were so successful they eventually became equity-holding key employees.
As the company started growing, Willem shifted his hiring strategy toward people who have “seen the movie before”, recruiting veterans from industry leaders like Mews and Pace.
Raising external capital was always part of the plan to fuel their big vision. Bookboost joined the Vendep portfolio in 2025. Willem notes that the Finnish mindset (direct, professional, and no-nonsense) resonated perfectly with his own Dutch roots.
Reflecting on the partnership, Sami Ahvenniemi, Partner at Vendep Capital, notes that the team has proven to be even stronger than initially expected, possessing exceptional industry expertise. Sami describes Willem as a strategic "product driver" who deeply understands how the hospitality industry is evolving.
The relationship is defined by constant dialogue, with regular bi-weekly check-ins and daily Slack messages to toss ideas back and forth. Willem actively utilizes Vendep as a sounding board, sharing thoughts on everything from daily operations to strategic projects. This transparent collaboration allows for a clear exchange of opinions and ideas, helping to support the team as they navigate the challenges of scaling a global SaaS business.
Vision for the future
While Bookboost started as a guest messaging tool, it has evolved into something much deeper. The company has built a "system of record" for all guest data: reservations, reviews, and communication.
The next frontier is accelerating that record into more agentic workflows in a “system of action”. By adding more agents & skills, and providing them with a unique context of the “golden profile”, Bookboost is enabling hotels to turn massive amounts of data into automated, personalized actions that actually drive the business forward. "There is a unique potential for a vertical hospitality platform with a strong data foundation to enable agentic workflows in day to day operations," Willem explains.
Advice for other founders
Based on his journey from digital nomad to software CEO, Willem offers these insights:
- Validate before you optimize. Don't spend time optimizing something you haven't validated with a customer yet. Build something simple, talk to your customers, and find the patterns in their needs.
- Pick attitude over skills. This is especially true when hiring juniors. If someone has the right attitude, they can learn anything. Make sure they are doing work that gives them energy.
- Trust your gut. Data and facts are important, but building a company is also an art. Intuition is an equally strong force as data when making decisions.
- Complement yourself. Find leaders whose "power zones" are different from yours. A leadership team that complements your weaknesses will accelerate the company faster than anything else.
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