Artificial intelligence is rapidly finding its way into hotel operations, but for Aiva founders Lucía Marí Sanguino and Paula Rodriguez, the opportunity is not simply to give hotels another chatbot. Their ambition is to create technology that understands what guests might need, acts at the right moment and connects the fragmented systems already operating behind the scenes.
It is an idea rooted as much in Ibiza’s hospitality industry as it is in artificial intelligence.
The two founders grew up together on the Spanish island, surrounded by an industry in which delivering exceptional guest experiences is fundamental to the economy.
For Lucía, that connection became particularly direct.
“I grew up in hotels and ran operations at a resort in Ibiza,” she tells Breaking Travel News. “Guests stay a week and want things, but nobody asks them at the right time. It isn’t that staff don’t care. Nobody has the context or the hours to do it for 400 rooms at once.”
Paula approached the same problem from an engineering perspective.
“We grew up in Ibiza together, so hospitality has been part of my life from the start,” she explains. “As an engineer, I saw hotels with good software that never reached the guest when it mattered.”
Connecting the fragmented hotel
That disconnect became one of the foundations for Aiva.
Hotels today can operate numerous technology platforms covering everything from property management and reservations to restaurants, spas, activities and guest communications. Yet the founders argue that having more data does not necessarily mean understanding the guest better.
“Most hotel tech is either a system of record that stores data or a messaging tool that sends what it’s told,” says Lucía.
“Aiva sits between them. It decides what a guest should be offered and when, then makes it happen. The information is already there, spread across the PMS, spa, restaurants and activities. Nobody sees the whole guest.”
This is where Aiva’s founders make an important distinction between generative AI capable of answering questions and AI agents capable of taking action.
“It completes tasks rather than answering questions,” Paula explains.
“A guest asks on WhatsApp for a cabana tomorrow, and Aiva checks availability, books it and charges the room. And it never guesses. If it can’t confirm something, it hands the question to reception.”
That final point is significant in hospitality, where an incorrect answer about a reservation, restaurant booking or hotel service can quickly become a service problem.
Why timing matters more than discounting
Aiva says its technology has already generated a 250% increase in non-room ancillary revenue in its deployments.
Rather than attributing that increase to aggressive selling or discounting, Lucía says the result comes principally from understanding when an offer is relevant.
“Timing, not discounts,” she says.
“Whether a guest heard about the sunset cabana used to depend on who they happened to talk to. Aiva makes the offer when it’s relevant, and that’s what drives the 250% increase in non-room ancillary revenue.”
For hotel operators, however, impressive technology metrics need to translate into measurable commercial results.
“We run pilots with control groups, because that’s the only proof a revenue owner trusts,” Lucía adds.
The implications extend well beyond selling an additional spa treatment or dinner reservation. If hotels can understand the point during a stay at which a guest is most likely to want a particular experience, ancillary revenue becomes part of the guest journey rather than a separate sales exercise.
Giving hotel employees their time back
The second major area Aiva is targeting is productivity.
The company says its technology saves approximately 27 hours per month for every front-desk employee using the platform.
“For every person on the front desk, we save 27 hours a month,” says Paula.
“That time comes from the repetitive questions: hours, towels, Wi-Fi, directions, availability. We have one rule: if a feature adds a task for the front desk, it doesn’t ship.”
For Lucía, the objective is not to remove people from hospitality but to allow them to concentrate on interactions where human service genuinely matters.
“Staff get time back for the guests who actually need a person.”
It is a philosophy that runs through the founders’ view of artificial intelligence.
“Technology should cover the gaps between staff, not replace them,” Paula says. “Hotels already know what great service looks like. They just can’t deliver it to every guest at every moment.”
The difficult part isn’t necessarily the AI
Behind the seamless guest interaction sits a considerably more complicated technology challenge.
Hotels frequently operate a collection of legacy and modern systems that were never designed to communicate seamlessly with each other. Connecting them is difficult enough; allowing an AI system to take reliable action within them raises the stakes further.
“Hotel systems are fragmented and often old, and some barely expose their data,” Paula explains.
“Reading is one thing. Writing reliably, like posting a charge to a guest’s bill, is where most integrations fail. We go deep before we go broad: one integration fully right before the next.”
That approach also reflects the realities of selling technology to hotel operators. Few properties want to replace their fundamental technology infrastructure simply to introduce another service.
“Asking a hotel to change its core system ends the conversation,” Lucía says, “so we fit around theirs.”
Personalisation without building outside profiles
As hotels seek to personalise experiences using increasingly sophisticated technology, questions surrounding guest data and privacy inevitably follow.
Aiva’s founders say the platform is deliberately designed around the information available through the hotel’s systems and the interaction taking place with the guest.
“We never store personally identifiable information,” Paula says. “Aiva works from the hotel’s own systems and the conversation itself, never outside profiles, and it uses what a guest has shared in the context they shared it.”
Lucía describes the principle in distinctly hospitality terms.
“A good concierge remembers your coffee order, not things you never said.”
More than a digital concierge
Despite its ability to interact with guests and coordinate services, the founders are reluctant to describe Aiva simply as an AI concierge.
“We don’t position Aiva as a concierge,” Lucía explains.
“A concierge responds to what a guest asks for. Aiva works at a different level: it understands what a guest is likely to want across the whole stay and coordinates the hotel’s services and operations to deliver it.”
For now, that activity is concentrated within the resort environment.
“Today we work inside the resort, but there are exciting things to come,” she adds.
That leaves considerable scope for expansion. A hotel stay involves multiple potential interactions before arrival, throughout the property and potentially after departure, creating an opportunity for AI systems capable of maintaining context throughout the journey.
Building a new layer of hotel intelligence
Looking towards 2030, Rodriguez believes one of the biggest changes may come not from individual AI interactions but from the cumulative information they create.
“Every conversation creates a record that didn’t exist before: what a guest asked for, what was offered, what they bought, and when,” she says. “That compounds.”
For hotels, such information could eventually influence much more than guest messaging.
“Hospitality has always run on what staff remember,” says Lucía.
“Once those interactions are captured, hotels can understand their guests in ways that were never possible: what to offer, how to staff, what to build.”
The ultimate test for AI in hospitality may therefore be whether guests notice the technology at all.
For Aiva’s founders, success does not mean making a hotel feel increasingly automated. It means using technology behind the scenes to allow the experience itself to become more relevant and responsive.
As Lucía puts it: “The best hotels will feel more personal, not less.”
