I’m becoming increasingly convinced that we’re building the perfect ecosystem for users who don’t actually exist.
A kind of digital town square where everyone talks about integrations, connectors, and apps inside ChatGPT or Claude as if the average hotel guest were some hybrid of a full-stack developer and a power user with unlimited free time.
In reality, most people just want to book a room.
They don’t want to wonder what the hell Viator is, why they should connect Tripadvisor or SynXis to a conversational assistant, or what level of trust they should have in any of it before they’ve even decided where they’re traveling.
I think we keep designing experiences based on a flawed assumption: that the value lies in the infrastructure.
But it never did.
The value has always been in brand recognition.
Without it, this entire castle of APIs, connectors, and microservices becomes little more than an elegant intellectual exercise. A bit like quoting Deleuze at a cocktail party in the hope of impressing someone.
(Spoiler: it rarely works.)
At the heart of the paradox is something simple.
To connect something, I first need to know what I’m connecting.
That requires a level of awareness that simply doesn’t exist.
What traveler actually knows what SynXis is? Who can explain the difference between a booking engine and a PMS? Who has even heard of the hundreds of systems that populate our industry’s technological rabbit hole?
Which makes me wonder whether we’re confusing technological possibility with actual human desire.
Because between “You can connect your booking engine to ChatGPT” and “Your guests know what SynXis is” lies the same gulf that separates theory from practice.
Or, to borrow from Jean Baudrillard, the distance between simulation and reality.
And somewhere in the middle sits a guest who connects absolutely nothing.
Not because they can’t.
Because the question itself is irrelevant to them.
At the end of the day, they simply don’t care.
See you next week,
SIMONE PUORTO
