INTERVIEW:
All companies are strongly associated with stories and people behind the companies. We at Uleabo are by no means an exception in this case, and we don't want to be just a faceless corporation among others. That's why founding partner Jussi tells in the interview a little bit about who we are and what we do.
WHERE DID IT ALL START AND WHAT IS ULEABO OY?
''ULEABO Oy is a company providing accommodation services founded together by the partners. We wanted to start a company where we can offer quality, home-like accommodation to our customers in destinations where we ourselves would like to live.
On October 16th 2019 one of the founding partners received a message "idea" on their WhatsApp. It was ULEABO Oy, at that point still called as company X. Our interests are: business, investing and thus also becoming wealthy. We started to "pitch" the idea as a group of friends, and that's how we quickly found a pool of owners. The owners then set up a company under the name ULEABO Oy, which was chosen from among many alternatives.''
WHAT DOES ULEABO OY DO AND OFFER?
In short, we are an accommodation company from Oulu. We offer our customers furnished apartments for both short-term and long-term accommodation. Our high-quality apartments are located in Oulu downtown. We bought the first apartments in December 2019, two months after getting the idea off the company.
HOW DID IT GO?
ULEABO's first customer arrived at the beginning of January, so the business started rolling. Very quickly, the reviews and awareness of our apartments increased on the AirBnb and Booking sites, so that our apartments moved up the list, and naturally more reservations started to come. So you can say that the snowball started rolling. February was almost full in terms of bookings for three apartments, with bookings approx. 90% of the maximum. This continued until the beginning of March, when everything stopped. Not much more about this topic, because everyone has already heard enough about it. An important milestone was reached in April when we got the Superhost title on the AirBnb website. This proved that we are doing things right.''
WHAT NEXT?
''We have strong faith in the company's operations and future. We have received so much positive feedback from our customers during the operation that we are boldly on our way to increasing the accommodation capacity. We believe that domestic tourism will grow in the future and Oulu will also be better-known when becoming European Capital of Culture.
We believe that in the future high-quality apartments in Oulu downtown and superb customer service will guarantee that we will be able to accommodate more of you also in the future.''
-Jussi, founding partner