Sebastien Leitner
Let’s get one thing straight. According to our guest today, making pizza is an art form, and there is only one real masterpiece in the world. My guest argues that the only acceptable pizza is the purely simple classic margherita. Made of beautiful olive oil, tomatoes from Naples, and buffalo mozzarella from Caserta. To quote my guest, there is no topping, or everything that is not a margarita is blasphemy. Just like a perfectly crafted pizza nourishes the soul, true hospitality is an art form, a warm human connection between a host and a guest. Both rely on simplicity to shine. But in our rush to modernize, the hotel industry has often buried that beautiful simplicity under mountains of unnecessary, chaotic technological toppings. Joining us today is Simone Puorto, a philosopher turned hotelier who now operates as an outspoken tech futurist. And he’s not afraid to polarize an audience. In fact, he once received a death threat for predicting that human revenue managers will be the first jobs permanently replaced by automated digital workers. Yet despite his profound love for automation and AI, Simone’s vision for travel is shockingly simple. He believes that to save the sacred, nourishing relationship between the host and the guest, the hospitality of tomorrow must actually become tech less. So, are we hurtling toward a dystopian nightmare of robotic human less check ins, or will invisible technology finally liberate us to provide that warm connection and actual care for our guests? And more importantly, will we be eating a simple properly sourced margarita when the dust settles? The answer might completely shatter your view of the industry. Welcome to The Turndown, Simone, it’s a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Welcome to The Turndown.
Simone Puorto
Thank you so much.
Sebastien Leitner
I’d like to know what keeps you up at night these days, Simone. And you can go wherever you want to go.
Simone Puorto
Yeah, so first of all, thank you so much. What keeps me up at night? So we were discussing a little before off camera. So except for my kid, it’s about, you know, what is really interesting to me, what has been interesting for the last few couple of years is how the industry is changing and what the industry might look like in just a few years with, you know, automation coming into the space at a higher speed, AI, this new concept around digital workers and agentic AI. And so, my question is always the same. If we’re getting all of this technology into the picture that, you know, I’m a fan of, you know, I’m a techno enthusiast, is it still hospitality or is it something else? And it doesn’t have to be something worse, but is it still hospitality? And so that is kind of a philosophical question that keeps me up at night very often. So, to my world.
Sebastien Leitner
Well, I think to level set this discussion, what is hospitality from your point of view in twenty twenty six? Because we can talk about the future, we can talk about the past, but if you are very unfiltered, very honest, in twenty twenty six, what is hospitality from your point of view today?
Simone Puorto
You know, I like words. It’s one of my many folds. And if you go back to the root, hospitality comes from hospice, and that’s Latin. The funny thing is that it means two things at the same time. It means host, but it also means guest. So, you have this very interesting, like you often do with Latins, a dichotomy of two words defining different concepts under the same term. Right? And so I always like to play with the idea is like, okay, let’s say we go to a more human less kind of hospitality, that to a certain extent already exists today, right? The example I always make is Airbnb. We always, we all had that kind of experience where you go, you know, you check-in on an app, you check out on an app, maybe you talk to the host via WhatsApp, you got your key card on a PO box, you basically have no human interaction. Is that still a hospitality? Because if we look at the Latin term, that’s not a hospitality because you’re removing the host out of the picture. It’s only the guest. Right? So what is hospitality today? It’s hard to say. I would say that if anything, it’s more guest centric, but not in the way that we like to create the narrative around it. I would say that it’s a little more self-service in a way, right? And again, I think it’s an interesting question that we should ask ourselves. What is the, you know, it’s a dough test. What are we giving away? What are we getting out of that? So, I think that this is probably the first time since, I don’t know, the first hotel was two thousand five hundred years ago. I think the first one is somewhere like seven hundred BC. This is really the first time in the history of hospitality that this question really means something, and that we need to sit down and probably redefine the term itself. So I don’t know, I don’t think I have an answer for that. I think if anything, right now hospitality is a moving target. And what we could do is probably try to probably will always be a moving target from now on. But at least we need to make sure it’s moving target within a certain perimeter, because otherwise it can mean pretty much anything. Didn’t really answer No,
Sebastien Leitner
but let me rephrase in order to see, you know, where we’re at. From your perspective, hospitality today is less about the host, it’s more about the guest. Yes. In that equation, in that sort of, I’m the host, I have a house, I’m opening my door to a guest, right, in the traditional sense of host accommodating a guest, today in twenty twenty six it is less about the host, or at least to the guest he’s less visible. And it’s more about who’s the guest, and let’s accommodate the guest to the best of our capabilities, at least at this point in time. Is that a fair analysis?
Simone Puorto
Totally. And I can also say that the best of the capabilities of the host sometimes can also mean being invisible, not being there. You know, for some of these guests, the fact that there will be nobody on the other side that will be a totally human less experience could actually be a plus. And that is really, you know, because I think up until a few years ago, we always lived in a very black or white situation. Right? You got the traditional hospitality on one side, you got people centric, high human touch, and then you got everything that is, you know, non traditional hospitality. Apartments, you know, even BNBs for to a certain extent. Right? And it was very like a fun club mentality, you know, you were either the hospitality fan or you were the non hospitality fan. And I think it all started during COVID, it started to blur, you know, and now you got people that can pick up a human centric or a human less experience, depending on whatever, you know, where they are with their life, what the reason for the travel is, whatever. Right? And now I think we are less black or white when it comes to picking up where to sleep. And but this, of course, changes the dynamics because, you know, when you say guest centric, when the industry says guest centric, we always think about hyper personalization. That to me it’s a myth by, you know, we can pick it up later. But anyway, I think what is happening is it’s more guest centric because the guest is taking the role of a host very, very often. Think about it. Again, you have an Airbnb experience. You will be the guest and the host. The fact that you’re checking yourself in, you’re acting as the guest and the host. So the responsibility of the check-in experience is pretty much yours. It’s a funny situation. I don’t think we have any real history in the past to look for and to anticipate what is what is really changing.
Sebastien Leitner
Alright, lots to dive into, but before we get into many of the areas that you just mentioned, I want to sort of introduce you, Simone, to the audience. Who are you? What do you do? And why should people care about your opinion? I mean, you clearly have an opinion, right? Oh, yeah. So give me your elevator pitch. Give me your dating profile. Sorry, too much information.
Simone Puorto
Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So you want the Tinder version of it. So is So the short story is this. I didn’t want to do this, you know. When I started twenty seven years ago, I was studying philosophy. I wanted to be a philosopher teacher, a philosophy teacher, or a philosopher, even better. I was nineteen, I said, what is the dumbest job I can get? And I knew how to speak a little English, I knew how to speak a little French. I said, I’m going to work in a hotel, and I’m going to take the night shift. There’s there would be nothing to do when I can study, you know, my my beloved philosophers. And somehow, I fell in love with the with the industry, and I started working more and more into hotels, to the point that when I was twenty eight, twenty seven, twenty eight, I was general manager for a small group of boutique hotels in Rome, right? But I’m also a mason trope, so I don’t really like people too much. You know, I like people in very small doses, and that doesn’t fly well with the hospitality narrative. So I said, okay, maybe what I can do is I can take a step back and take a look at what is happening behind the curtains of hospitality. So I started working more into the consulting space and I worked for several years with a consulting firm that has been recently acquired by Sendyne. I got bored with that as well, so I just, I opened my own consulting firm around eight years ago, and it’s called Travel Singularity, and the main idea was that I was kinda expecting that things were about to change, that is why the name. And I fell in love with the whole, you know, this whole idea that keeps me up at night, and that is how you integrate technology in an industry that is so traditional, and it’s so human centric, and it’s so anthropocentric in a in a way. And from there, I started doing what I do most. I do what most people know me for, and that is writing probably too many articles. I publish eight books. I’ve done, I don’t know, probably thousands of hours of MBA guest lecture at this point. I’m on the board of a dozen travel tech companies. And yeah, that’s pretty much it.
Sebastien Leitner
So, you’re keeping busy, right?
Simone Puorto
Yeah, keep the blood thin.
Sebastien Leitner
That’s amazing. You started the introduction with you were looking
Simone Puorto
for the dumbest job that you could find, and yet you fell in love with that industry very quickly. Because I’m dumb myself, so I found my industry. That’s the philosopher’s perspective.
Sebastien Leitner
What made you fall in love with hospitality?
Simone Puorto
So, basically, when I was let me give you a little extended version of it, because when I was so I was working in this very bizarre environment. It was basically two hotels with one single booking and reception office, and it was it was managed and owned by trappist monks. You know, if you’re not familiar, they’re very famous too for for making beer. And so this was Rome in ninety eight, ninety nine, so you can imagine. It was like, you know, stone age when it comes to technology. So they didn’t even have a PMS. What they were doing, honest to God, they were taking big big pieces of paper, taping it with with with tape, and they were like, if you had to change a room, was it was it was a nightmare, you know, you had to to delete everything and so forth. So it was so frustrating, and it took so much of my time that I wanted to do it in a little more clean way, and I came up with a I was always a nerd, so I came up with like a proto PMS, and that was the, you know, that was the beginning of it. And to me, was so interesting that you had such an amazing industry working on such broken infrastructure. And I said, look, if you can fix the infrastructure and you can liberate the people, actually this is going to be amazing. And, you know, and it was amazing for a long time. I got a lot of my my best friends. I know them during during these these these years. So it was to me, I fell in love with with the people and I fell in love with this connection from technology, believe it or not. And I always thought that if you could fix one of the problem, these these people could actually give the best of them to a certain extent. Right? Funny thing is that twenty seven years passed, and I don’t think we are there yet, if anything, probably who we are in a worse position than we were before, but that was what was very interesting for me. So we didn’t fix any of the problems you identified
Sebastien Leitner
twenty seven years ago? That sounds frustrating.
Simone Puorto
Look, I think on paper, yes. I think the main problem we have is the fragmentation of technology, right? And our industry, it’s complicated, you know, because to be fair, we always complain about the fact that we are not a very tech savvy industry. But I always make the same example. Compare it like, let’s say tomorrow you want to open a little shop, and you want to sell shoes, okay? You can probably operate with no software at all. You know, you just need a POS to get credit card charges, and that’s pretty much it. If tomorrow you want to open even a small boutique hotel, like I know ten rooms, you will need at least, I would say six, seven different software, right? You will need a PMS, will need a channel manager, you will need a booking engine, you will need a payment gateway and so forth. So, the fact I think that we were in a situation where we had to implement a lot of technology very early on, when technology was still, this was, of course, pre cloud, pre API, pre everything, you know, very monolithical way, And we kinda inherited debt. So now we got a lot of technologies that in silos that work perfectly, but when combined together, they kinda create this overkilling of technology. Right? So and on top of that, you know, the the the funny thing about hospitality is that if you’re running a shop, you can close the shop at some point. You go home and you you go to sleep and that’s finito. Know, start again the next day. That’s not the case with hotels. You never close. So there’s never a time where you can sit down and think and maybe reassess your tech stack. So you’re always running on an emergency, a continuous emergency, and the last thing you want to do is to change your tech stack while you’re doing that, right? So, and I think this creates like the perfect storm and the situation where we are in the situation we are right now. So, I wouldn’t say it’s the vendor’s responsibility, it’s just that we did the technology before technology was really ready to help us in a way. You make me remind myself of COVID when I hear, you know, that the hospitality ever stopped. There were depending on the country, there were probably a few weeks during COVID where hotels stopped operating. They were closed, right? They had to send stuff away. And, you know, we weren’t really there, I guess operating a hotel at that moment in time, but otherwise, the way I describe it, it’s you’re driving a car and you’re trying to change the engine, you’re trying to change the wheels, you’re trying to change while you’re driving, right? And it’s extremely hard. Is that what you’re observing? Is that the Totally. The way I put it, I put it probably less poetically than you. And the way I put it is, if I was an notelier today, I would rather go through a divorce than to change my PMS, because of all of the pain that goes with that, you know. Because first of all, as you said, you’re you’re driving a car, and you still need to change the engine and the wheel while you’re driving. And, you know, best case scenario, now you need to ride with two engines. So one needs to be the backup of the other. So, it’s not uncommon that you’re changing one piece of tech, and now you need to run with two different pieces of tech up until the moment you can run with the last one. You know, with PMS implementation, that’s pretty much always the case, right? You run them in parallel. I don’t know of any other industry that needs to go through this, you know. Again, you close, you review your tech stack, you move on. That is not the case for us. So, on one side, there’s the operational side of things. It’s very hard to do it while you’re, you know, always putting off And on the other side, I would also say, and this is probably part of the vendor’s responsibility, it is very hard for a hotelier to understand what piece of technology to buy, right? It’s very hard to compare. Even websites that I’m not going to mention are trying to go a little more meta and trying to compare different software, but it’s still it’s very hard unless you get a proper demo, and maybe you got an implementation and you got the system for six months, and then you can see if that is the right fit for you. It doesn’t work, so it’s a lot of word-of-mouth that it’s never a good thing. And so I would say these are hospitality typical situations that are unique to our industry. I cannot find another industry with the same problems really.
Sebastien Leitner
Yeah. What’s your take in Rome? You’re in Rome right now. What’s your take? The average hotel uses how many systems today?
Simone Puorto
Too many. I would say. More than that. I would say that on average, like anything, if you’re not considering really small properties, I would say that on average at least you got fifteen different software. Look, I’m working on a tech stack project for a client of mine and it’s an average property in Switzerland, Italian Switzerland. We’re talking eighty five rooms, so it’s not super small, but it’s not even a thousand rooms. And we’re talking about twenty seven different software, twenty freaking seven different software. And on top of that, you know, again, the general manager just signed contract after contract because he needs to solve some problems. Now we had the time to sit down and look at the cost of these technologies and it’s crazily high. You know, it’s only the technology is probably ten percent of the overall revenue, you know. So, is what it is.
Sebastien Leitner
So, out of the twenty seven, give me two where hotels should invest more in and two that you think should disappear.
Simone Puorto
You want me to get so many enemies now.
Sebastien Leitner
No. That’s okay. Know? This is a safe space. Nobody’s listening right now.
Simone Puorto
Oh, yeah. Know. It’s good for the moment. Look, I think there are some technologies that whatever you pick will make no difference at all. Okay? And that is pretty much everything that is invisible to the guest. And it’s pretty much non operation centric. Typical example could be a channel manager. Okay? You will not touch it anyway. You will work on a PMS, the guest will not see it. You know, you can probably save some money and go with an okay channel manager. You don’t need to get best of the breed. PMS, that’s a different story. For the better of the worse, it’s still a very PMS centric industry, you know. So it’s probably where you need to sit down and do your research. And I would say that what you need to do is not only look at it from an operational point of view, meaning is this going to solve my problems, but also from a future proof point of view, meaning is the system open enough? Because I don’t, especially now, I don’t know if I need to integrate like, I don’t know, an agent in two years, for example, right? Can I do that with the infrastructure of my PMS? Is it cloud native? What are the APIs? Do they even know what an MCP is? You know, all of these questions that I imagine the typical hoteliers cannot and should not ask to the vendor, right? That’s not the job of the hoteliers. So I would say the PMS is, again, as I told you, it’s probably better to go through a divorce. So I would say PMS, if you want to spend a little more, spend on PMS, you know. And then that I think there is a lot of ancillary stuff out there that doesn’t really make a big difference.
Sebastien Leitner
Would That you could get rid of or I think that to a certain extent you can get rid of, or probably you will not need it below a certain number of rooms. And I would say that other software are probably we put too much faith on this software. So we overestimate what this software can do for us. Give me an example.
Simone Puorto
I know you don’t wanna name anyone, anyone, but you don’t need to name a brand, but give me at least a category. So, an RMS for a boutique hotel. Okay, this is something that how much is it going to change your revenue? And how much you’re going to get the same results without that piece of technology? This is a I think it’s a fair question, right? And again, I think it comes from the inability to compare exactly the different technologies, because you I don’t know, a two hundred room property in Paris, right? With like a very leisure centric distribution, very US centric. In that case, every room will count, you know, like a small one percent extra profit will make all the difference in the world. And I can understand. Okay, sure. We need system to back us up, you know, or even a system to take decision for us. Great. Twenty room boutique hotel in, I don’t know, the south of Sicily? Will that make a big difference? I don’t know. I’m not sure. Okay? The problem is that maybe the hotelier goes to a trade show, you know, goes to the whatever, you know, your local version of ITB or WTM, and some vendor is talking about the fact that now you can increase your revenue and your FBAR by a billion percent, and with no context whatsoever. Now you go back and you say, we need an RMS, and you sign an RMS. Right? And then you go to the next thing. So now we need a semantic analysis tool. Great. The problem is that you got two reviews a day, so the volume is never going to be there. Or we need now, I don’t know, like a a I’m trying hardly not to name drop, but it it can be like like a platform aggregating data from other destinations. Great. But but still, you know, only five properties in my destination signed up with that vendor, so the numbers I have are completely irrelevant. So I think a lot of this technology looks great on paper, but when you put it into the reality of the single property or the single destination, you need to give a closer look and really see if that makes a difference or not. Not to mention CRMs or whatever we put under the name of CRMs, you know. So it’s I think I think if you basically, you’ve got two extremes here. You got on one side, you got the hotel that will stock with a PMS and a channel manager and a booking engine, end of story. And on the other side, you will have the hotel that will sign everything that looks new, and at some point this will pile up, and you get you get to the to the example of this client I told you about with twenty seven different software. And I would say that probably seventeen needs to go, because they will not only they make no difference, they cannot be integrated between each other. So now you have this nightmare of text silos everywhere, and just to understand where is the single source of truth for your guest, it’s pretty much impossible, right? And, you know, that’s a completely different story with data and data warehouse, but it’s, I would say that the problem is that this is not a decision that a hotelier can take by himself or herself. This is not a decision that I could take when I was a hotelier myself, because you’ve got more urgent things to deal with, you know. I was a hotelier for a long time, you know, I’ve seen them all, you know, you know, guests dying in the room, you know, like a room getting on fire, whatever. And you deal with that, you know. If you have somebody locked in the elevator for three hours, that’s your emergency, you know, you cannot think too much about what kind of PMS you need to buy. And this is where the consultant get into the space. The problem is that a lot of these consultants are taking quite a lot of commissions from vendors, so you never know if what they’re suggesting you is exactly the tool for you. And you create this, you know, quite liminal nightmare dystopian effect?
Sebastien Leitner
That sounds terrible. I know. Okay, hold on, there’s a lot to unwind here. Be critical about what systems you use, is what I’m reading between the lines. Not every RMS will deliver the value it actually promises to deliver, so, you know, you may be using a lot of systems for its intended purpose, but the value it creates is not worth the is is what I understand from, you know, in this. I asked you, before we go into the consultant area, I asked you, is there a system or is there a solution out there that you think in twenty twenty six hotels should invest more in? Because, you know, it is something that is exciting from your point of view, that is unlocking value, that, you know, will be the hottest commodity in the future.
Simone Puorto
I don’t think it’s a piece of software, but it’s a shifting mentality. And I think what really need today is to make sure a hundred percent that we got the single reliable source of truth. And that is something you never find, right? So typical example is, there’s a lot of talking about, you know, I don’t even want to go into agents, but think about, I don’t know, conversational reporting or integrating some conversational booking engine and so forth. That’s all great on paper. But in order to do that, you need to make sure that these systems are trained on the right data. And often you don’t even know where these data are, you know, because part of this data will be on a PMS, part of this data will be on your food and beverage system, part of this data will be under your CRM and so forth. So it’s very hard just to, even just to understand where the source data is coming from, right? And I’m pretty sure if you go to a hotel you’ve been like many, many times, there will be so many different version of yourself and each version will say a different story, right? All just a little piece of the story. So I think what is really exciting for us right now is trying to find a way to find an agnostic, so it doesn’t even need to be vendor centric, single source of truth. You know, like a data warehouse, you can put it like that. You know, I’m oversimplifying. But because, again, first of all, you don’t know what you will need in a few years. Probably you don’t know what you will need a few months. And let’s say that at some point I will need to get to a level of hyper personalized marketing automation that is only possible if I really understand who Sebastien is. And to understand who Sebastien is, I need to get all the pieces. It cannot be all around, otherwise I will get just like a small part of the story, right? Let me give you an example. I go to the same hotel over and over again, and you know, they got a lot of information on the PMS about what time I check-in and what time I check out, for example. But the PMS is not recording data from the FMB system, for example. And I’m a vegetarian. And now you’re sending me on Easter, you’re sending me this menu, and the first thing I I read is that, you know, you’re you’re you’re offering me a la like a like a an anello, an Italian anello. Okay? A baby lamp. And I said, okay. Fine. But you should know that I don’t need this stuff. Right? And the problem is that there are so many different versions of Simone, you know, there’s the PMS version, there’s the food and beverage version and so So I would say that it’s what you, the shift needs to be, do you know exactly where your data lies, You know, and let’s say that tomorrow you want to integrate like something as simple as a chatbot on your website, or like a digital worker picking up the phone. You know, it’s all very much doable. Where do you plug and play this system? You know? Where is the source? And this is where the problem starts. Not to mention that maybe you want, again, maybe you wanna make sure because now you got this fear of missing out and you start signing more and more contracts. But again, you will work even in more silos now because maybe you up a contract with chat or an automatic email platform. And when you decide to move to another software, you understand that all the training has been done internally and probably entirely by that platform, right? So, to me, it’s more about make sure that the ownership of data is under control. It’s more about the governance of your data right now, rather than the single pieces of technology. This is something we can discuss later. But if I know that I got an agnostic single source of truth that I can plug and play to whatever system I use, I’m already in a very, very good position. Now, I would tell you may say, isn’t that my PMS? And why is it not my PMS? Isn’t that the single source of truth? I would say that first of all, I would say this again, it could be an unpopular opinion, but I think it’s a dangerous situation to be so PMS reliant, and so PMS centric when it comes to the industry. So that’s the first The
Sebastien Leitner
second one is And why is that? Sorry, I need to double click on that. Why is it dangerous to be reliant on a modern cloud based PMS system? Would say I’m talking about the database that is underneath your reception, sitting on Yeah, yeah, for sure. You know? Sure.
Simone Puorto
I think it’s just a question of, again, I think it’s more a question of mentality, because now you over rely on your PMS for whatever reason, right? And it kind of creates, even in the industry, of creates this fun club mentality where you got, you know, the best of the breed versus the only one, you know, that’s the conversation we all listen to. Okay. And it creates even more confusion, right? So, now you got, and you know, you have this all the time, you got on one side, you got the hoteliers that are all for the big O and you know, the only one system and the other one is, you know, I’m going to go super agnostic with this, you know, best of breed. And it still it’s, wouldn’t it be better that the data is somewhere else and this is agnostic and I can just plug the PMS on top of this data and I will free myself from this dependency? And I can I could be I could be overthinking this, but I but I think it’s this is problem number one? The problem number two is that the problem is that PMS is not always the most reliable source, because it’s not always the entry point. You know, sometimes the entry point is something else. And are we sure that this data is coming back correctly into the BMS? So you got, for example, the first example is the the data entry errors, human data entry errors. Again, my name is Puorto. Nobody can pronounce it right, not even my mother. Okay? Like, it’s I go to a hotel, I got like twenty different spelling of my name. That’s already one problem, right? So it’s so that’s one. Or the other one is, what is the level of, because there’s a lot of talking about, you know, open system, open API, that’s all great, but we never really think about the quality of this API, of this documentation. So what kind of data are we sending or giving it back? Let me give you a typical example. So, you get an RMS, and you’re seeing that the pickup for a specific date is growing and growing and growing. So, their RMS will tell you, look, you need to increase your price. But now you see that the information that is coming from the PMS to the RMS is not the availability for each room type, but it’s the availability in general. So for example, instead of telling you, look, we’re selling a lot of rooms, but it’s only double single use rooms because there is a pharma meeting in town, okay, so that’s the only kind of room they’re going to buy. Now the information that is coming via the API is, look, we’re selling a lot of rooms, so you need to increase all of your prices, and now you start increasing your prices for a triple room or a family room, but nobody is buying these rooms, right? This is like a beautiful system, a beautiful RMS that is being trained on data that are not correct. So that is another thing. Okay? So it’s also about the quality of the interaction with the different software, and that can create another issue. And the depth of the APIs or the current,
Sebastien Leitner
the frequency of Exactly,
Simone Puorto
exactly. Especially, you know, I was discussing the other day, again, unpopular opinion, but I was discussing about the fact that, you know, Google launched this UMCP protocol, right? And that is to standardize the purchases directly into generative engines, you know. And I said, look, this is pretty much the same thing we used to have with Book with Google. I don’t know if you remember, at some point with meta search, said, you can book, you can finalize your reservation directly inside the search engine result page. Never worked out, because the volatility for us, it’s way higher than it’s, that with retail, right? So, are so many different things at stake at the same time that the quality of the API needs to be something you should be concerned about. But again, is it something I can ask to a hotelier that the main focus is to care about guests? Because I don’t want developers to check me in. I want, you know, people with soft skill to check me in. So they need to rely on somebody else to, first of all, understand what they do, but also give them the best solution. So it’s like we are at our core, we are a very soft skill industry, but we are requested to have such a degree of high skill, of hard skills, that it’s not even funny. Okay? So and that is, again, open a typical LinkedIn job position posting. Right? We’re looking for a receptionist. Fine. It needs to be able to work in a team. Fine. It needs to be very human centric, you know, and soft skill. But now it needs to know twenty five different software. It needs to understand how to get this commission out of Expedia, and it needs to understand how this integrates into that booking engine. And this is where you got, you do not get the best of the breed, because now you got this mythological creature that are half developers and half receptionists that are not good at it, at either, you know? You see my point? So, it’s we cannot ask the hospitality people to understand the technology. We should guide them. How we guide them? That’s a whole different story.
Sebastien Leitner
What’s the solution?
Simone Puorto
I don’t know. It’s it would be great to have a proper system at least to filter the to filter out which technology is not correct for you. And it’s not even what is correct for you. But just, you go into the market now, and I live in Italy right now, as I told you, and we are bombarded with local vendors, right? Especially, you know, there is one company that is buying everything right now. So, now you go there and say, okay, I need a booking engine. Great. I start googling booking engines and I got like a thousand different results. So which one is the best for me? It’s pretty impossible now to understand that. So if we can find a way just to filter out the noise, that will already be something. In order to do that, though, the vendors should be open to give the information about their systems. So now the system can be actually compared. Usually there’s a lot of secrecy behind that, you know, like where is this PMS making money because it looks too much, too good of a deal, and then you understand that maybe they’re getting a zero point whatever percent on top of your transactions. And that is, you know, something probably you didn’t realize at first. And again, it’s something that maybe you will realize after a year, you’re usually utilizing that software. So it’s I would say it’s more about trying at least to remove the noise when it comes to to picking up the right tech stack.
Sebastien Leitner
Isn’t that what our ChatGPTs and large language models promise us to do? I mean, to cut through the noise, replace, you know, Google dot com. Right? I’m right now shopping for a, I kid you not, pizza oven. Right? And I have I have three criterias. Right? I I want it to heat up so I can make Napolitan pizza, right? So it needs to be hot enough. It needs to have the right size, right? And I think that’s about it, right? Like, it needs to be the right size, and it needs to be hot enough. Those are the two criterias. And of course But you’re not, look, you’re not Italian because otherwise you will have another twenty five criterias, so I can guide you into that after, you know, off camera. So, but if I go on Google, I see two thousand results. That’s crazy. Like, I don’t want two thousand results. I want a short list of four or five that are available in my country that I can pick up, that I can actually find in a store that I can actually look at before I purchase it. So and and it brings us to sort of the the change of of travel, if you will. But isn’t that what, I guess, the promise of the solutions like ChatGPT make it so attractive that, you know, suddenly I no longer have two hundred booking engines to choose for, I have three.
Simone Puorto
Yes. But let me let me let me let’s do a little game. Okay?
Sebastien Leitner
Okay.
Simone Puorto
How do you ask this question to ChatGPT?
Sebastien Leitner
I write.
Simone Puorto
I what do you do you write? Give me the prompt.
Sebastien Leitner
I give you, who am I? First, I usually start with who am I. Here’s where I’m located, this is what I care for, this is how much I mean, in this particular context, this is how often I use the pizza oven, right? I provide some context around who am I as a person, right?
Simone Puorto
Yes.
Sebastien Leitner
And this is what I’m looking for, and this is what I care for. At least, you know, heats up quickly. I only have three criteria’s because clearly I’m not Italian, right? I’m still, you And that’s it. But maybe a paragraph. It’s a maybe a paragraph.
Simone Puorto
What is the difference, though? It’s a pizza oven can work in isolation. Right? The only thing you need is do I have enough power in my house to to light it up? Do I have enough and I fuel and space. That’s it. So fine, you know, that’s going to be relatively easy to make a comparison. Now, let’s say I want to get an RMS. So the kind of question, if I follow your logic, I’m a hotelier and I can say, look, I’m at the forty key property in Paris, you know? And I need, my prices are pretty dynamic. And I just wanna make sure that I have a system that back my human revenue manager up, so he can help me out, right? And I start doing this and I got a list of results. Fine, and I see that the best solution for me is, know, Mickey Mouse, RMS, whatever, right? But as a hotelier, I don’t know what is the right question to ask, and the right question to ask, for example, is, this is the PMS I’m using. On top of that, I’m in Italy, so I’m the only country in the entire world where invoicing is different from all the other places in the world. So you need to take into consideration that aspect as well. On top of that, my accounting is is is living in the seventies, and he keeps using this stupid account system from nineteen eighty, And I cannot get rid of that because otherwise I need to fire that guy. You see, there are so many different variables here that it’s impossible to create an answer. To get an answer, it’s like the dream of ABS. So the prompt is two hundred variables. Three hundred Exactly. And it’s impossible because first of all, even if you can get the right prompt, you need to have the, first of all, the technical understanding of the technology. But you also need to have a pretty good understanding of the SOPs, what you’re actually doing in your properties. What are the operations in your properties? What are the process in your properties? A vendor will not have that. So you need to have like a savant, somebody that knows technology, know exactly your operation, now can tell you this is the right way to go. Okay? Even for us, you know, if a client comes to me and says, look, I need to change my RMS. So look, I got like a billion question before we even start coming up with a short list. That is the main problem, you know. And it would be great, and I think there are there is at least one company that can do that to have something that is a little more proactive. So instead of you going into charge GPT and looking for an oven, is, you know, the system coming to you and say, look. Okay. You need an oven. Now reply to all of these questions. And after all of these questions, I will give you the best oven for you. Fair. It’s a slight it’s a different it’s a different angle. You see? It needs to be proactive. That is the problem. Again, I’ve seen many, many clients just going with a piece of technology that looked amazing on paper, except that it didn’t connect to that specific software that for whatever reason could not be changed. And so it’s not about finding the best solution for you. It’s finding the best solution for you within the perimeter that this solution will work and connect to all the other technology stack. Not, last but not least, is the human aspect. You know how it is. You know, we got, let me give you another example, and I’m sorry, I’m talking too much probably, but you know, a typical example could be something like that. So I’m doing, I’m helping another client with the tech stack. So, we’re changing like PMS, Booking Engine, and Channel Adventure, painful experience to go through. And I got my own idea of what I wanted for them, but he told me something that I didn’t think about, and that is I do outsource a lot of my staff. So it could be that I got, especially for night managers, I take somebody from an external company, you know, I outsource it, right? And these guys, they are trained on this specific PMS. They only know this PMS. If I don’t take this PMS and they come and work for me, they don’t know what to do with this other PMS. That is way better than the one I’m going to pick. But the constraint for me is my operations. So again, this is something else that I think vendors never really question is that on BigBerry looks great, and it is great, but they’re not taking into consideration the human aspect, the SOP aspect, the reality of the different interactions, and it’s a fragile ecosystem, especially with independent hotels. This is where I think it’s very hard to make a comparison. And this is why I think chat GPT or whatever LLM cannot really help us out if we do in a passive way.
Sebastien Leitner
Okay. Let’s move from pizza search to travel search. Right? Like, in the last twenty years, the number one demand channel have been OTAs. I mean, I used to work for one OTA myself. Since, I think, two thousand one or two thousand, it was basically the revolution moving to online travel agents. Yeah. A lot of hoteliers that we speak to are wondering these days that, you know, travel search will change again, moving potentially from OTAs to agents. What’s your point of view? Is that going to happen?
Simone Puorto
I think the UI is going to change, but the infrastructure is not going to change. And this is You know, I think there are two schools of thought when it comes to that. There are people that will tell you that this will become a renaissance of brand dot com reservations, direct reservations. Unfortunately, I’m not a very big believer in that, because I still think that OTAs right now are in a very good, and you know, you work for one of them, in a very good position when it comes to super structured data, you know. They speak the language of the LLMs. They speak the language of the agents. So if an agent needs to pick, this is probably where it’s going to get the information from. So I can see maybe in a little more far away future, hotels adding on top of the brand dot com website, a brand dot com agent, and now it’s a slightly different story. My problem though is always the same that agent to agent communication between an agent and brand dot com agent would only start after the user or an agent, it can be human or not, it doesn’t really matter, will make a selection of properties. And selection still needs different sources. So, different sources, what is the best platform to get this kind of data? It’s an OTA. So I still get it maybe for the, let me phrase it differently. I think this is the first time I think about it in these terms, but I think it makes sense. I think AgenTiC in the future could be similar to what search brand protection is right now. It’s last mile. So I decided to go to hotel whatever, and I’m going to talk with the agent of hotel whatever, and I’m going to get all the information, okay? And this will be a beautiful conversation between human to agents or agent to agent, doesn’t matter. But for everything that is top and mid funnel, that conversation will never be agent to brand dot com agent. It will be more agent to whoever has the best structured data. So I don’t think it’s going to change any balance in terms of distribution. It’s more going to change balance in terms of UI. So we use ChatGPT or we use Perplexity, we use Gemini or whatever. What is on the background is pretty much irrelevant. It’s just we’re using this UI and that’s pretty much end of story, right? So I’m not a firm believer that it’s going to change for the best when it comes to more direct revenue because of agents.
Sebastien Leitner
So you don’t think Google will, I guess, answer any agents with their own data? You think they will still rely on OTA data?
Simone Puorto
Again, let’s say you okay. Again, let’s let’s do a game. You need you need a you need a hotel in Barcelona for tomorrow. Right? You don’t know where you wanna go. So Google is talking to which agent. You know, best case scenario is is the destination agent, but it’s still an aggregator of data, right? So it’s okay, I’m looking for, and these are my criterias, you know, I want it to be close to La Rambla, and I wanted to pay less than two fifty a night, want breakfast included, whatever, right? And still the agents need to do some comparison now. And comparison, you know, it’s in the name, it needs to compare different things. So, different hotels, but even different prices for the same hotel, that’s the main concept of mega search if you think about that, right? So, in that case, why should the agent talk to the hotel agent itself? It’s more likely that it will come up with a selection, with a filter, and then the conversation will be with with the brand dot com agent. So I see it more as a as a last mile application, if anything.
Sebastien Leitner
Okay. So no change, basically. Is that fair? Or not big changes?
Simone Puorto
I think it’s going to be cosmetic changes. Changes again, UI changes. It doesn’t mean no changes because we see that, you know, like, for example, for my clients, I’ve seen at least a twenty percent drop in organic traffic. And this is all going to geo, you know, it’s ChatGPT, perplexity, and so forth. It’s great. The problem is that when they get on the website, nothing really changes, You know? You got you got the top funnel is never on the website anyway. So in terms of what is happening after, nothing really is changing. You know? It’s changing probably the top funnel. But, again, it’s mainly changing in the way you interact with the interface rather than with the content. So, instead of going into twenty different websites to compare, maybe you go into one single interface and this single interface is talking to twenty different So, it’s, of course, it’s an easier experience for the guest. But is it changing anything in the dynamics of distribution for the hotel? I don’t see that. And probably, I’m sure you’ve seen a few of these experiments with chat GPT apps, you know. Marriott has got one, a core has one, you know, a couple of vendors came up with these apps. But it’s still a clunky thing, you know, you need to connect an app. It’s still, it’s not there yet, you know. And the reason why I wanna go to chat GPT is because I want to compare. And on top of that, there’s something else I think that is interesting is that when you look at the results from Google Analytics, so the keywords that trigger the visit to your website, and when you compare it to the prompts that trigger the mention of ChatGPT on SEMRush, for example, it’s completely different, you know. The search is very much transactional keywords, mainly branded keywords. It’s funny how you show up in mentions for people that started the conversation somewhere else entirely. Right? To your case, let me give you an example. You start looking into a Pit Sullivan. You said, okay, I wanna know more, but what is the criteria I need to I need to check out? Okay, I’m going to send a message to Simone. You you write to me, and I write you back on WhatsApp with twenty five rants about why that would never work. You know? And now you said, okay. It’s probably right. And I said, look. Because the best pizza in the world is from this little pizza place in Naples, blah blah. And you go, okay, let me check, so maybe I can understand how they do pizza, and now you get exposed to the destination. And now that you’re exposed to the destination, you said, you know what, maybe I’m going to go do a weekend there, you know, it’s more intentional and conversational, it’s part of a very long story. So the intent is completely different when it comes to when it comes to that. And it’s funny, you know, I over the last few months, I’ve been really spending a lot of time just reading to the prompts that that trigger dimensions. And it’s so funny because most of them are not even hospitality related. You show up from conversation that maybe started weeks ago about something completely different. And that’s to me, it’s very interesting. Is it changing anything in terms of the the distribution dynamics? Not that I see.
Sebastien Leitner
Want to give me a lot to thought about. I want to do a quick rapid fire with you before we talk about sort of the future outlook. So rapid fire is very simple. I throw things at you and you give me a short answer with, you know, anything that comes to mind. Let’s start with, what’s one thing that will disappear from a guest hotel room?
Simone Puorto
That’s a good one. TVs in the way we think of TVs.
Sebastien Leitner
So they will become screens. They will become screens, and you bring your own account, or do you bring you watch local TV?
Simone Puorto
Yeah. No. It’s going to be screens like that you that you simply just just doubled your screen on whatever you’re you’re watching on your Netflix account. Going to double it on your mirror it on your screen.
Sebastien Leitner
Okay. All in one PMS or best in breed?
Simone Puorto
You are really a nasty one. That is I cannot answer that. That’s okay. That’s an answer. No, no. Look, I don’t want to be politically correct, but it depends. Some properties will never be able to do the best in breed. You know? Some properties will need to go to the all in one. Like I’m thinking more resorts. I mean, luck with a beautiful best in one, and I I got a couple in mind, but good luck just making sure that they can manage like the golf tee time or the casino or whatever, you know, stuff that we don’t always think about, that is going to probably be more like a big thing. But for average independent property, if you really want an answer out of me, it’s going to be best of breed.
Sebastien Leitner
Okay. MCP or APIs?
Simone Puorto
APIs. You thought I was going with MCP, but it’s still too early. Too many hidden things.
Sebastien Leitner
AI centric or human centric?
Simone Puorto
Humans are luxury, as I always put it. So it’s AI in the background, humans in the front.
Sebastien Leitner
Okay. Favorite pizza topping? We gotta go there.
Simone Puorto
There’s no topping. There’s no topping, my friend. It’s all it’s only margherita. There’s no amitani. There’s no other pizza. I don’t even know why you have menus. It’s Okay. Everything everything that is not a margarita is blasphemy.
Sebastien Leitner
Okay. Okay. So but there’s there’s cheese on the pizza.
Simone Puorto
Right? Yeah. Yeah. It’s it’s it. You you got beautiful olive oil. You got a beautiful tomato from Naples or close to Naples and a beautiful mozzarella from a very specific place in Kassevte. And that’s it. That’s it.
Sebastien Leitner
That’s it. Okay. Okay. What’s one question you wish more people ask you but don’t?
Simone Puorto
I think a lot of people is obsessed. And again, I’m a I’m a futurist, so it’s counterintuitive come coming from me. But I think a lot of people ask me about the future. They don’t really ask about what they need to fix now to make sure that they are future proof. So, I think this whole last mile mentality of pragmatism, of just implementing something, it’s going to be dangerous. So, I would like to, the question that I don’t get asked very often is, what should I do now, not what I should do tomorrow?
Sebastien Leitner
Okay. So, what’s the answer?
Simone Puorto
Do a proper due diligence of three things. Tech stack due diligence, SOP due diligence, people due diligence. Make sure you understand how these interact with each other, and you already did ninety percent of the work.
Sebastien Leitner
Okay. You publish in a constantly new things. Right? You’re very active on hospitality net. What’s one topic that, I guess, polarizes most people that you’re publishing on?
Simone Puorto
Digital workers. Automation. Automation. Okay. Look, I was talking to a friend today. He said, look, I remember it’s not I’m not joking. I received the death threat once because I said I I was talking about the specific I said, look, the the way human revenue managers the way we think about the human revenue managers today, it will disappear. They will be the first one to go. Okay? To my students, I always say, look, if you want to go into revenue management, be very careful what you mean with that, right? Because the way that our assumption of what a revenue manager is, is going to disappear. And every time I talk about automation, and I try to be as really balanced as possible, you know, if you know a little bit my work, I’m very ethics centric. You know, to me, it’s very important that whenever we implement some level of automation, this will not disrupt the human workers. But every time I do mention that, you got huge and polarized reaction. On one side, you got the the the transhumanist way of people saying, look, humans are are crap. You know, we’re going to automate everything, and this would be a beautiful society. That’s a dystopian nightmare for me. On the other side, it was a look, this is hospitality, we’ll never get technology into our processes, it will always be human centric. And my take on that is always the same, and I said look, I think we’re experiencing what I call reverse uncanny valley effect. And that is, you know, the typical uncanny valley is when you got a robot that is looking to human. Right? And I think what we’re seeing now is humans looking a little too robotic. And you see quite a lot of that in hospitality. You know, we all experience that. You go, you check-in, and you got somebody just typing on a screen. That’s not really hospitality. So my take is always the same is, is this really the human kind of interaction I want in a hospitality experience? Or can this be automated so that this guy, instead of typing on a keyboard, can have a real interaction with me. And I never found, I’m not able to find the sweet spot of how I can talk about this topic without getting very heated reactions.
Sebastien Leitner
I think it’s the fact that we tend to be to see ourselves, myself included, through the lens of what we do professionally, you know, to the point that the only thing that we like, we had this conversation today, you know, but the majority of the conversation is what we do for work, you know. We know each other, so it’s a little easier. But even in conversation, it’s hard that you see two people talking about who they are, you know. So, if you remove what you do, for a lot of people this also means that you’re removing who you are. So, it’s an identity problem, you know. And that is my thing. When you talk about automation, you’re talking about the identity and you need to be super careful. You make it existential.
Simone Puorto
Right? It is totally existential, my friend. Totally existential. I can see that. You know, it’s a trigger for most people. It would be a trigger for me as well. A few months ago, I was contacted by this guy. They said, look, what about you train this model, you train an agent with everything you know, and this agent will give consulting to clients and you get twenty five percent out of all the contracts. And I said, okay, this is kind of cool. But then I thought about it, I said, look, this is really just, it’s a personal attack to a certain So I fell into my own trap. So I don’t know how you can talk about that without getting crazy reaction. And I think probably it’s healthy that you get reactions when it comes to that. It means that we haven’t given up yet.
Sebastien Leitner
Alright. I wanna close the program with, I guess, referring back to something you shared at the beginning, which is you have a six year old son. Right?
Simone Puorto
Almost, yeah.
Sebastien Leitner
So, forward, he is, you know, a teenager, he’s finishing school, he wants to pursue your career. What are you going to tell him when he says, I want to work in hospitality?
Simone Puorto
So I hope the hospitality industry he will inherit will be different from the one we have now. And I always say that this hospitality is is a is a liminal space between what it used to be and what it will be. And and again, it can can sound counterintuitive, but I think that the future of hospitality will be completely techless. And and follow me up on that. Right? Again, as I told you now, if if let’s say my kid is twenty now, and he wants to go and work in hotel today. You know, I would what I would say to my son is, look. You need to understand how to work with people, how to work under stress, but you need to have a a decent understanding of technology. When my kid will be twenty, he will not need to have any understanding of technology. Technology would be just on the background. It will be an afterthought. Okay? And and I think we could, if we make it right, we could go back to the to the real core of what hospitality is all about, and this is what I told you at the very beginning. Because remember, hospice, host, and guest at the same time, but the same word is also the sacred relationship between the guest and the host. And I think because we are now so caught up with trying to make operations better and better and better and better and better, make make everything more scalable, we’re forgetting about that. So if my kid wants to get into hospitality, would say, look, focus on the soft skill, care about people, and always remember that hospitality is about being the guest and being the host at the same time. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to be anything that has to do with putting data into a PMS. If we can get to that, where technology is just something on the background, we can focus back to the hospitality that I knew, you know, because when I was in the late nineties, I fell in love with hospitality because it was so human centric, you know, and technology was broken, but it was a lot of fun, you know. I got so many friends out of that just because we know technology, we had the time just to, you know, to spend some time with guests. And I think we can go back there with a better infrastructure.
Sebastien Leitner
So we have what, ten, twelve years to make technology disappear?
Simone Puorto
I don’t think we’ll make it in time. But twenty, maybe twenty.
Sebastien Leitner
Alright, Simone, thank you so much for joining the program. It was a pleasure talking to you. I hope to have a chance to have pizza with you at some point.
Simone Puorto
Whenever you want, my friend.
Sebastien Leitner
But thank you so much for joining the podcast and the program.
Simone Puorto
Thank you so much. Bye bye.
Sebastien Leitner
Alright. Bye bye. Thank you for listening. If you like what you’re hearing, make sure you subscribe to avoid missing the next episode. It helps us produce better shows and get the most interesting guests. Thank you for your support.
