Best Practice Series — Vol. 22: Buubble — Iceland's 5 Million Star Hotel and the Purest Form of Transparent Hospitality

Most hotels offer a ceiling. Buubble offers the sky. Not as a metaphor — literally. The roof of your room is transparent. The Milky Way is your ceiling. The Northern Lights, when they appear, are your entertainment. This is the 5 Million Star Hotel.
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The Origin: A Client Suggestion That Became a Category
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Buubble was founded by Robert Robertsson — a Danish entrepreneur and Northern Lights expert who was, by his own account, organising trips for clients to Iceland when one of them made a suggestion: why not build a hotel with a clear roof, so guests could watch the Northern Lights from the warmth of a bed? The idea was not original — versions of it existed in Finnish Lapland, where glass-roofed igloo hotels had been established. But those properties were expensive, high-infrastructure, and fixed. What Robertsson heard in his client's suggestion was something different: a transparent sleeping structure that was mobile, minimal, and deployable on existing farmland without the construction cost or permanence of a conventional building.
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He tested the concept with a single bubble — a completely spherical air-pressurised PVC structure, standing on small metal legs, containing only a bed. The response was immediate. Within a short period he had expanded to six bubbles, then to nine. The name he gave the concept — the 5 Million Star Hotel — is perhaps the most perfectly constructed hospitality tagline in this entire series. It says everything in four words: you are not sleeping indoors. You are sleeping under five million stars. The stars are the hotel.
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Forget the city, forget work and enjoy being out in pure nature. Listen to the birds and butterflies. Enjoy the midnight-sun scenery or, if it rains, listen to the drops falling onto the bubble. This is what Buubble offers. Nothing more, and nothing less.
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The Product: Radical Transparency
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The Buubble is, by design, a product of almost wilful simplicity. Each bubble is an air-pressurised transparent PVC structure — not glass, as it appears in photographs, but a material with the optical clarity of glass and the structural resilience of an inflatable. The structure maintains its shape through internal air pressure. Inside: a comfortable bed, a heater, and a simple internal arrangement that leaves the entire curved wall and ceiling transparent. There is no bathroom in the bubble itself — guests use a central service house a 30 to 50 metre walk away, with private shower and toilet facilities. There is no room service. There is no minibar. There is no Wi-Fi in most locations.
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What there is, however, is a view that no conventional hotel room in the world can replicate. The transparent bubble surrounds you on all sides and above. The forest, the sky, the stars, and — when conditions permit — the Aurora Borealis are not something you see through a window. They are the room. Guests describe the experience of lying in bed watching the Northern Lights directly overhead not through glass but through transparent space as one of the most singular moments of their travel lives.
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The bubbles are scattered across forested farmland, each separated by sufficient vegetation and distance to ensure complete privacy from other guests. Despite the transparent nature of the structure, guests report a strong sense of seclusion — because the darkness of the location, the trees, and the physical separation between units mean that the only thing visible from inside the bubble at night is the sky above.
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The Experience Architecture
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Buubble's guest experience is structured around two touring packages rather than a standalone accommodation booking — a deliberate shift in business model that Robertsson made to create a more complete and curated guest journey. The Golden Circle Tour combines the iconic Golden Circle route — Thingvellir National Park, the geysers, Gullfoss waterfalls — with dinner at a local restaurant, an evening at the Secret Lagoon thermal pool, and a night in a bubble under the Icelandic sky. The South Coast Tour combines the Seljalandsfoss and Skogafoss waterfalls, the black sand beach at Reynisfjara, the town of Vik, and a night at the south coast bubble location.
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The bundling of the bubble stay with guided experiences, meals, and natural attractions solves a challenge that standalone accommodation operators in Iceland often face: the bubble itself is extraordinary, but guests need context, programming, and logistics around it to feel that the trip is complete. By integrating the bubble stay into a two-day experiential package, Buubble transforms from an accommodation option into a complete travel product — and one that is significantly easier to market, gift, and position as a bucket-list experience.
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The Locations
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Buubble operates across multiple locations on the south coast of Iceland and in the Golden Circle region, all chosen for their proximity to key natural attractions and their distance from the light pollution of Reykjavik and other inhabited areas. The south coast location is surrounded by trees on farmland, with the nearest services in the villages of Selfoss, Eyrarbakki, Stokkseyri, or Hveragerdi. The Golden Circle location is near Raufarfoss and accessible from the tourist routes connecting Gullfoss and Geysir.
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The properties are literally on farmland — the land is owned by local farmers who host the bubbles as a complementary venture to their primary agricultural activity. A welcoming host meets guests on arrival, assigns them their bubble, and is available during the stay for any issues. The check-in is between 17:00 and 20:00; check-out is before 10:00. There is no formal reception area, no lobby, no concierge desk. The experience begins the moment the car turns off the road and the darkness of the Icelandic countryside surrounds you.
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The Concept as Cultural Phenomenon
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Buubble has become one of the most photographed hospitality experiences in the world — not because of a marketing campaign, but because the image of a transparent bubble in an Icelandic forest, filled with the glow of a bed and the arc of the Northern Lights overhead, is one of the most immediately compelling photographs that travel creates. The social media distribution of that image has been entirely organic. It is the product of guests arriving, experiencing something they had never experienced before, and wanting to share it with everyone they knew.
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This is the most powerful form of hospitality marketing: the experience itself becomes the advertisement. Buubble has never needed to describe what it offers in complex terms. The image says everything. The concept is so simple, so visually arresting, and so emotionally resonant that every guest who experiences it becomes a distributor of the brand.
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What Buubble Proves
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Buubble proves that the most powerful hospitality concept is sometimes the most minimal one. A transparent bubble on an Icelandic farm, with the Northern Lights for a ceiling, is not a sophisticated product. It is a supremely honest one: it offers exactly what it promises, nothing more, nothing less, and does so with an integrity that no amount of branding or interior design can manufacture.
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For operators thinking about what defines a genuinely distinctive outdoor hospitality product, Buubble is the clearest possible answer: find the one thing that only your specific place can offer, and design the entire experience around making that thing as accessible and as undiluted as possible. In Iceland, in winter, in a field away from the city lights, the one thing no other hospitality product in the world can offer is the Aurora Borealis overhead. Buubble does exactly one thing: makes that possible. And it turns out, that one thing is enough.

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