When the world shut down during the pandemic, hospitality ground to a halt. Hotels were empty, restaurants shuttered, and the future seemed uncertain. In the midst of this disruption, a simple Google Sheet designed to support struggling local businesses unexpectedly went viral. That spreadsheet would eventually evolve into Obvlo, an AI-powered platform that now delivers personalised travel recommendations for hotels worldwide.
“The business as a business entity, like a registered business, started actually as something completely different,” says Callum McPherson, founder and CEO of Obvlo. “It started as a marketplace for commercial property. So just before Covid, we had, um, mostly food businesses renting out kitchen space on our platform.” When the pandemic wiped out that model overnight, McPherson and his team were left with a stark choice: adapt or disappear.
In response, they created a simple list of restaurants and food businesses still open for takeaway and delivery. “It went viral and it got picked up by newspapers and things. We did it in London, Edinburgh and a few other places. And yeah, we turned that into a website and then we turned it into an app.” This unexpected success revealed a much larger opportunity: people craved curated, relevant information about their local area.
As the world reopened, the needs of both users and businesses shifted. “Our food businesses told us they wanted more people in, you know, they wanted to actually… ‘we’re open for business, we want you to come and sit in our restaurant.’ And our users, the consumers, were telling us what they liked about our offering was personalisation.” This was the turning point where Obvlo began its transformation into the global platform it is today.
A journey fuelled by travel and curiosity
McPherson’s career has been anything but linear. “I’m the founder of the company called Obvlo, but as an entrepreneur, I probably have quite a typical non-linear path,” he reflects. After earning a management degree, he embarked on an epic road trip from Scotland to South Africa, covering 40,000 miles. “I just fell in love with travel,” he says. “Having those experiences traveling and the people I met and the places I went to… it’s definitely a space I wanted to be in.”
His early career included stints working in hotels and later in financial technology. “The company I worked in used bank data, transactional data for credit risk and underwriting,” he explains. “But what it gave me probably was a real good sense, where you can learn everything about a person from their data and you can tailor their experience.” This fascination with personalisation would become central to Obvlo’s philosophy.
McPherson also experimented with various entrepreneurial ventures, including a successful motorcycle storage business. These experiences taught him the value of solving real problems. “If I can sort of see a problem and talk to people with that problem and learn about it and offer a solution, and you know, people want to pay for that, you can build a business there.”
Building Obvlo: From problem to product
Initially, Obvlo operated as a consumer-facing app, but McPherson quickly realized the real opportunity lay in serving businesses. “We thought there must be other businesses out there who want to give recommendations, want to give personalised experiences. And they could be our customers.” Hotels were the obvious fit. “We know that hotels obviously have concierge ways and, um, people in their teams who might, even before a guest arrives, find out why they’re coming, their interest and try and give them recommendations.”
Their first pilot hotel confirmed the potential. “We built a sort of white-labeled version of our product for them. The guests would come in and give their interests and why they’re traveling and receive personalized recommendations for their stay.” From there, growth was rapid, with Obvlo now serving independent hotels as well as global brands like Hilton, Marriott, and Virgin Hotels.
At its core, Obvlo tackles a fundamental challenge: creating and maintaining accurate, engaging content. “Creating the content is labor intensive and skilled, and you then have to maintain it and keep it up to date, and cities change and so on,” McPherson explains. Without a solution like Obvlo, hotels rely on outdated manual processes. “Someone in your team will get tasked with doing that every six months, and they leave and no one knows who’s in charge. And it all just sort of hangs there.”
How the technology works
McPherson describes Obvlo as having “two sides to the coin. On one side, it’s creating the content and on the other it’s delivering the content.” Hotels provide a brief, and Obvlo’s AI-driven system does the rest. It scans trusted sources such as The Guardian and The New York Times, aggregates data from platforms like Google and TripAdvisor, and generates fresh, unique guides.
“Here are the best rooftop bars,” McPherson explains as an example. “Then we’re going to go and read reviews from Google and TripAdvisor and other places, then generate a brand new set of descriptions. And we’ll get the opening hours and the social media links, and we’ll find media for the place, and we’ll put all this together, package it up.” This process repeats weekly or monthly to keep information accurate and relevant.
The other side of the coin is delivery. Recommendations are presented through a variety of channels: hotel websites, SEO-optimised landing pages, mobile apps, or in-room QR codes. This flexibility allows hotels to engage guests at every stage of their journey, from pre-booking to in-stay experiences.
The human touch: Balancing automation and authenticity
While Obvlo leverages AI, McPherson is clear that technology alone cannot replace human hospitality. “We typically say or aim for like 90% automation and 10% not automation. If you try and automate everything 100%, you probably lose the human touch and some of the authenticity.”
This philosophy is embedded in their workflow. “We have real people who will configure the guides and then run the process and then review everything and actually make a few changes here and there,” he says. Hotels themselves also play a vital role. Concierge teams can add their own curated lists, clearly labeled so guests know which recommendations come directly from staff.
“AI is not going to take popcorn up to someone’s room,” McPherson adds with a smile, recalling his time working night shifts at a luxury hotel where small gestures created memorable moments. For him, technology should free staff to focus on these high-value human interactions rather than replace them.
Why hotels struggle with up-to-date content
For many hotels, maintaining accurate local information has simply been an impossible task. “If you’re a hotel, with even a medium sized team, you can’t realistically every day check that your local recommendations… are accurate. That’s not possible,” McPherson says. Outdated links and closed businesses frustrate guests and damage trust.
AI changes the equation by handling the repetitive work. “It does need to be seen as an assistant, like a helping hand, as opposed to like fully replacing what was there before. It’s just making it faster, better, cheaper.”
Unlocking insights through data
Beyond improving the guest experience, Obvlo provides hotels with valuable data about traveler preferences. By analyzing user selections and behavior, hotels can better understand why people are visiting and what interests them.
McPherson shares an example from Edinburgh: “Outlander, which is not a big TV show, I don’t think in the UK, but for some reason massive in America. We created a guide for some hotels in Edinburgh around Outlander, and it was like the number one viewed guide.” This insight helped hotels tailor their marketing to a key demographic they might otherwise have overlooked.
“It’s a value exchange,” he explains. “Guests are willing to tell you their interests because they’re going to get something in return. They’re going to get recommendations, which they want.”
Scaling globally and looking ahead
As Obvlo expands internationally, McPherson remains focused on adaptability. “We are an AI first business, so we have a very modular design to our software architecture.” This allows the platform to quickly integrate new AI capabilities as they emerge.
Looking to the future, McPherson sees Obvlo moving further up the traveler journey. “The battleground really moving up funnel and actually discovery and inspiration becoming more and more important,” he says. Rather than simply enhancing stays, Obvlo aims to inspire trips in the first place by showcasing destinations and experiences.
For hoteliers looking to improve their local recommendations, his advice is straightforward: “Get the basics right.” Many hotels still have broken links or outdated suggestions on their websites. “Don’t worry about personalisation or try to create this like incredible dynamic experience yet. Let’s start by getting to a baseline. Everything is accurate.”
As the pace of technological change accelerates, McPherson remains grounded in his mission. “AI is not about replacing people,” he says. “We’re very much about empowering. We work so closely with hotel teams to try and make their life easier and allow them to focus on things like that.”
From a simple Google Sheet to a platform shaping the future of travel, Obvlo’s journey reflects the same combination of human creativity and technological innovation that defines the modern hospitality experience.
