Turning Pre-Arrival Engagement into Measurable Revenue.
I recently delivered a keynote at the SPARK Start-Up Summit at @LesRochesNews. My conversations with luxury hospitality operators kept circling back to one critical question:
How do we build value in a moment where teams are overworked?
The modern luxury guest expects a flawless experience, but the window to shape that starts 4–6 weeks before arrival, not at check-in.
That’s where Vibeslist comes in:
1. See exactly what is happening in the city during your guest's stay.
2. Share a curated digital event list before they arrive.
3. Extend the stay. Guests who plan ahead add +0.3 nights to their average length of stay.
After 18 months of development, our product is ready for enterprise-level delivery, and our first hotel partners are already live.
Time to speak with more GMs.
Next week's itineraries for San Francisco, Milan, Florence, Rome, and London are now deployed to our hotels partners.
The attached previews represent a fraction of the full intelligence briefs operating inside partner properties. Pre-arrival teams now hold the exact insights, from private caviar dinners and open-air opera to exclusive film restorations, required to solve the itinerary bottleneck before guests check in.
@vibeslistai is the enterprise platform turning pre-arrival itineraries into measurable revenue.
Set the standard.
@balabanskyy@LesRochesNews Grazie Artur! We did chose the hard path, which was building end-to-end our entire data quality infra. But now it's start paying off.
We're able to solve real pain points the Hotel industry struggled for the last decade.
Good Automated Curated Data sounds obvious but is king.
Turning Pre-Arrival Engagement into Measurable Revenue.
I recently delivered a keynote at the SPARK Start-Up Summit at @LesRochesNews. My conversations with luxury hospitality operators kept circling back to one critical question:
How do we build value in a moment where teams are overworked?
The modern luxury guest expects a flawless experience, but the window to shape that starts 4–6 weeks before arrival, not at check-in.
That’s where Vibeslist comes in:
1. See exactly what is happening in the city during your guest's stay.
2. Share a curated digital event list before they arrive.
3. Extend the stay. Guests who plan ahead add +0.3 nights to their average length of stay.
After 18 months of development, our product is ready for enterprise-level delivery, and our first hotel partners are already live.
Time to speak with more GMs.
Code refactoring and good architecture is something that we all learnt by making thousands of mistakes and manually rewire and polish our own code.
A simplification there, a over engineering there, a silly best practice there. But we made the decision and we took ownership of our own code.
Now there is a very deep philosophical question, if you are robbed of this learning opportunity as Vibe Coding just gets the job done, how the heck you will learn?
Like for me Vibe Coding is great because I have 20 years of coding experience and I made so many mistakes I just know when something feels off and i need to push Codex or Gemini into a different direction.
But
if you don't have that manual experience, how do you know when that is not right?
Sure other people reviewing, sure some code reviewing tools, but still.
Building software is at more an Art that just pure Science.
I don't have an answer, just very curios to see how the new Junior Devs will learn the Art of great coding and great architecture if they never write code by hand.
Sometimes I wonder why they don't teach how to Code Review a PR in college.
I mean, I understand there is a lot of believe cooked in what makes a good or bad PR, but I feel like just some foundational work like:
- when is worth add comment
- must this have tests
- what makes a test a good one
- is this code a potential performance hazzard
- is this code easy to mantain
- when is ok to push the limits and when is not
Maybe because it gets into the Art territory instead of Science, it can get hard to validate.
But I think helping young software engineer practice more the soft-skills in how to think good vs bad code, it's so critical, ESPECIALLY in the Vibe Coding Era.
kind of.....
distribution with AI only works if the product is good.
Let's not forget the 200+ project Google failed, even with their distribution.
I just think, for once, they might have built something that actually me personally I feel excited about it.
And it's a good motivation for everyone else to keep doing better.
So that we all benefit in this high-quality competitive market.
Apperently Gemini is actually a better experince, today, Dec 9th 2025 than ChatGPT.
I honestly did not believe that, but in the last 36 hours I end up having a much better experience with Gemini.
Ok, so what's actually happening.
The feeling I have is that ChatGPT is very very Academic kind of thinking, it gives you what you need but it's more School smart.
But what I need most of the time is Street Smart.
I want an AI that knows how to get the job done, don't talk too much, be able to anticipate my thinking, and cut the conversation when need it.
The race for the best Consumer AI is for sure like F1 2025 season, very very close, and you should never fully count out Max.
Well Done Gemini!
And can't wait to see how this race will play out in 2026.
happy to chat in person next week, and talk
Vibeslist, the Bloomberg Terminal for concierge teams: one living, taste-ranked map that replaces static lists and scattered websites. Vibeslist turns noisy city data into fast, on-brand recommendations, saving concierges hours and giving them an edge other hotels don’t have.
you know....
I used to over refactor for the sake of beauty, than when I was 25, I learn from this coder from Pixar, that you can get great code working in just 1 single file with over 2k line of code.
And with VIM it's even better because your productivity will 20x with all the keyboard shortcuts.
At that time I was like, this guy lost his mind.
BUT, windsom finds always his way to reach you.
Now, I am like "do not refactor that file till it starts bleading". It's 2k line, and works well, keep it as it is. Only when you feel the pain to work on it, than refactor it.
And yeah you right, taste is everything. And knowning when something is good enough or just time to make it better, takes time to learn.
I refactored so many projects in the last 20years of coding, that as CEO I end up having my team pushing at max speed every week, and then I stop by the codebase for an afternoon, look their code and do a big big big cleanup.
Maybe because I spent so many years built Infra, that I just can not have chaos in our codebase.
Or actually let me reframe it. Chaos is good, but I still want to make sure we can be productive.
The last thing you want in any codebase is when chaos ends up slowdown productivity by 2~3x.
One of my favorite memories when I was 22 was rewriting the same CMS I built from Php to Python to Node.js, and from SQL, to Postgress to Mongo.
I know, why? But hey, that was the fun of loving the craft. To be fair, once I was so mad at jQuery I end up just writing my own jQuery-Like library called Tiramisu, with @proudlygeek .
Best part of it, was that instead of calling $.wathever we had t.whatever aahaha
@proudlygeek made a sick landing page, I still think about it time to time how good it was.
it's is still up, which is crazy https://t.co/rdLPo83dLP
100%
And probably one more point is that weird balance between freedom to build and clear limits in what are the building blocks.
From when we are kids we are trained on pattern recognizing and master those to play in those limits.
Legos, Math, Minecraft, Cooking Recipes, Sports Moves and so on
Give too much freedom, you feel overwhelmed, give too much restriction I feel I can’t get enough skin in the game.
Every AI company that knows how to draw the line of where those freedom and restriction live in the User Experience will just unlock the new Bicycle for our Minds
Always love a good Steve Jobs reference 😆
When you build an Infra that can build clean dataset, oh boy everything gets so easier to build on top of it.
Then the real question is, what's good Infra in the age of AI?
Honestly I have my own thinking around it, and it change the answear based on what phase of your product you are.
Internally in Vibelist we started using the term Gen2, Gen3 as a way to define clear chapter of the different generation of Infra and Dataset we are building.
Gen 1 was very chaotic, honestly we had good intuition but not good structure, Gen 2 we really were able to build solid taxonomy, and create several internal tools to generate the labeling and vector we need.
So no we just finish Gen 2, literally today. Over 2.5k complex record all well classified and 20+ Taxonomy to support it.
Gen 3 which will last probably till end of Janaury is focus a lot on refining how the this structure needs to get more granular and let's just say smaller pieces of legos.
If you are in SF and love geek around Taste and Dataset, I am around to chat over incredible coffee.