In November, Simone Puorto, Head of Emerging Trends & Strategic Innovation at Hospitality Net, will speak at BTO 2025 in Florence, alongside Romy Abbrederis and Alessio Re. His talk, titled “Zero-Click, Zero-Friction: Rethinking Hospitality from Discovery to Operations?”, will explore the future of hospitality in an age of radical digital transformation.
On this occasion, BTO has published an interview in Italian, which we are pleased to share here in its English version.
Read original here and book your seat here.
Your speech at BTO is titled “Zero Click, Zero Friction: Rethinking Hospitality”. What do you mean?
We are living through a radical transformation in which the experience of the traveller and the work of the hotel operator intertwine within a system that nevertheless remains burdensome and full of friction. Searching for a hotel is complicated, managing one is even more so, and yet we continue to operate within an apparatus built on old, layered logics.
From the guest’s perspective, the era of the ten blue links on Google is already a relic of the past. More than sixty-five percent of searches today do not even lead to a click because the answer is already embedded within generative artificial intelligence systems. This means that a hotel’s visibility no longer depends on ranking in an SEO chart as it did ten or twenty years ago, but on its capacity to exist within the narratives that language models produce. To continue discussing search engines, disintermediation, or off-seasoning as if we were still in 2005 is to attempt to solve a novel problem with tools from the past.
Generative search will render SEO as we know it obsolete. The classic funnel will vanish with the arrival of a zero-click web. AI agents will become do engines rather than search engines. Conversational reporting will replace dashboards and business intelligence, and we will no longer consult graphs; instead, we will address questions directly to the data. Digital workers, hybrids between the biological and the artificial, will become a tangible presence. In a synthetic world, time spent with a human being will become a luxury, a paradigm I call “humans-as-luxury” (more here).
Complexity affects not only visibility but also daily operations. Many hotels still operate with closed systems, technologies that do not communicate, and outdated procedures that slow down every process and turn any integration into an obstacle.
The real question then becomes this: What would happen if we rethought the entire flow from scratch, including both those who travel and those who work in hotels? If hospitality were to become more fluid, lighter, and at the same time smarter, capable of freeing time and energy? Paradoxically, that very technological fluidity might restore a more human dimension.
But let us keep a little suspense about the final answer for the stage.
You were among the early adopters of AI models in the Italian hospitality sector, both as a consultant and board advisor, and as a founder of startups. What have you learned?
I have learned that every innovation always contains a paradox. In the case of artificial intelligence, the paradox is that precisely at the moment everyone obsessively names it, it actually ceases to matter. Soon it will be everywhere, and precisely for that reason, we will stop talking about it. Want an analogy? You do not need to know how the IP protocol works to have a website, nor do you need to master the architecture of the web to navigate it. The web has become an overthought, a natural, almost invisible presence. The same fate awaits AI.
Five years ago, it took millions to build what can now be achieved at a marginal cost of practically nothing. Competitive advantage is no longer in ownership or in building from scratch, but in the speed with which one reassembles modules already available, in the flexibility with which one changes course, and in the ability to never fall in love with one’s own hunches.
For this reason, I do not think that in five years’ time we will still be speaking of vertical AI companies in travel. I envision instead a landscape composed of modular ecosystems, agents, the Model Context Protocol, and APIs that act as neurons in a distributed network, generating experiences and services in a natural and almost invisible way. I would not be surprised if, by 2030, revenue management systems had disappeared altogether, replaced by an agnostic agent from OpenAI or Google connected to the ARI layer, capable of orchestrating property management systems, channel managers, and booking engines without anyone referring to it as AI anymore.
Already today, we see dozens of solutions that present themselves as specific to hospitality, but the trajectory is clear: artificial intelligence will become a transversal, neutral layer, integrable everywhere, just as the web did. There is no web for hotels, and there will be no AI for hotels.
Everything will be plug-and-play, and the true competitive advantage will no longer lie in the software itself, but in the hotel’s capacity to orchestrate that ecosystem with lightweight, scalable architectures that are ready to evolve.
You speak of more human hospitality precisely at a time when automation and artificial intelligence are on the rise. How do you reconcile this apparent contradiction?
The contradiction exists only in perception. Automation does not subtract humanity; it subtracts friction. A reception desk that must reconfirm every reservation manually is not more human because it is occupied with bureaucratic tasks; it is simply less free. Returning time to people means returning the raw material of hospitality. Humanity is not measured by the quantity of prefabricated smiles we distribute but by the quality of attention we can offer when it truly matters.
The paradox is that the more we delegate the impersonal to machines, the rarer and more precious personal interaction becomes. The notion that technology and humanity are opposites is a conditioned reflex, a trap of binary thought rooted in Western cultural habits. In nature, nothing is truly dual. Wittgenstein reminds us that the limits of our language are the limits of our world, and if we continue to think in terms of rigid oppositions, we will see conflict even where only continuity exists. The word itself is fracture.
The distinctions between human and machine, between thought and action, between reality and simulation dissolve. It is not AI that becomes human; it is we who render ourselves imitable. We reduce language to emojis, entrust memory to the cloud, and simplify ourselves until we become cloneable. What remains irreducibly human is not intelligence, but existential anguish —the awareness of finitude. At work, we will see polarization, with one side embracing total automation and the other embracing hyper-human roles. In the end, AI will fade as a distinct entity and become the invisible backdrop of our lives, just as the internet is today.
In recent years, you have served as a board advisor to several tech companies. From your privileged vantage point, which mistakes do you see repeated most often by startups moving into hospitality tech?
The most frequent mistake is to confuse technology with the solution, forgetting that technology is a means, not an end in itself. Many startups are obsessed with the feature, focusing on what their product does, and rarely ask why anyone would need it. The second mistake is extreme verticalization, building a micro tool that solves a detail without asking how it will fit into an ecosystem already saturated with interfaces, property management systems, revenue management systems, customer relationship tools, and so forth. Hotels do not need another isolated software; they need coherence, integrated flows, and radical simplification.
Finally, I often observe a cultural deficit; many new players discuss hotel technology without having ever worked a single day in a hotel. Technology without hospitality experience becomes a simulacrum.
To the MBA students I teach, who will be the travel tech CEOs of tomorrow, I reiterate that they are preparing for jobs that do not yet exist. One must not fall in love with what, but with the why. What will change a hundred times without asking permission? Actual competence is cultivating a view without walls, one that is capable of relinquishing fixed opinions. That is where possibilities open. If I could teach just that, my work would be accomplished.
For those who are unfamiliar with Simone Puorto, we asked him to introduce himself.
Do you remember that interview between David Lynch and Harry Dean Stanton? Lynch asks him, How would you describe yourself? Stanton answers, like nothing. There is no self. That sentence suits me. I do not believe my identity is so important; what matters is that through a series of coincidences, I often find myself immersed in unpredictable contexts and surrounded by extraordinary people, like the entire BTO team. For this reason, more than a protagonist, I feel like an antenna that intercepts and amplifies possibilities.
If you prefer the LinkedIn-friendly version, I’d like to describe myself as a technophilosopher. For over twenty five years I have worked at the intersection of travel and technology, I have written five books and hundreds of articles many as a ghostwriter or under pseudonyms, I collaborate with Hospitality Net as Head of Emerging Trends and Strategic Innovation which is a grand title to say that I try to understand what will happen next year, and I support tech companies as a board advisor and consultant, from BWG Strategy in New York to RobosizeME, Sleap.io, E23 and a dozen other entities ranging from property management systems to revenue management systems and automation and AI startups that I cannot name because of NDAs.
In the past I was general manager of a small group of boutique hotels in Rome and I worked in a large American web agency, but about ten years ago I left corporate life to create my own projects, Travel Singularity my boutique consultancy, Rebyu the AI startup for review management, and Elegia the creative studio that explores the links between AI human centered design and hospitality.
What else? A few years ago, I organised the first sector event held entirely in the metaverse, which for me was more an exercise in imagination.
But my story does not begin in a hotel; it starts with philosophy. As a young man, I wanted to teach it; I was obsessed with Günther Anders and the idea of human obsolescence, and I reflected on what it means to be human in a world dominated by technology. To pay for my studies, I sought work that would leave me with mental space, and I chose to work the night shift as a porter, with few people and long, quiet hours to study. It seemed perfect, but in the late 1990s, hotels were still working with paper and pen; some still do. To avoid going mad, I created a rudimentary proto property management system that simplified reservations and check-ins. It worked so well that the owner promoted me to the day shift, which felt almost like a punishment, less Nietzsche and more complaints, but it was also the unexpected beginning of my career. I was twenty.
At twenty-five, I was already leading a MICE team of thirty people. At thirty, I was general manager of a small group of boutique hotels that I had co-founded and named Dharma, inspired by the series Lost, which I have always loved for its metaphysical echoes and for my own spiritual confession as a Buddhist. In time, I realised that my inclination was less for daily operations and more for recognising patterns, connecting distant worlds, and reading the subtexts of technology and society, and so here I am.
Over the last ten years, I have also significantly increased my presence in academia, and I give guest lectures in several MBA and executive programmes from EHL in Lausanne to ESSEC, from Glion to the Italian LUISS, including IULM Roma Tre, the University of Parma, SHMS, the 24 Ore Business School, and many others. There, I have always delivered the same message: the point is not to fall in love with tools but to understand the deep patterns that move them.
This is why I have given myself the nickname digital bodhisattva, an ironic and at the same time serious way of saying that my trajectory has always been the same, starting from philosophy, passing through sleepless nights at reception, arriving at artificial intelligence, and continuing to ask what remains in all this that is irreducibly human.
Simone Puorto
Hospitality Net
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