Hospitality

The eight stages of a luxury trip, and the two nobody built for

Booking is the fourth of eight stages a luxury travel advisor works through. Software clusters there and thins out at inquiry and loyalty.

Booking is the fourth of eight stages a luxury travel advisor works through, and it is where nearly all the software was built. Sofiane Ghorbel, founder and CEO of AL Hospitality Group with more than twenty-five years in luxury hospitality, names the full sequence: inquiry, discovery, curation, booking, travel, follow-up, loyalty, repeat business. The two thinnest-served stages, inquiry and loyalty, are the two that decide whether a client comes back.

Why is generic AI the wrong shape for this work?

Because it is not organised around the workflow. Ghorbel names the mismatch directly:

"Most AI tools are generic currently, and hospitality needs workflow-specific solutions."

Then he lays out what the workflow actually is:

"Real workflow means start from the inquiry, go to discovery, go to curation, go to booking, it goes to travel, it goes to follow up, it goes to loyalty, and at the end repeat business. So this is the real workflow currently, and this is where enormous value remains to be created."

Most travel software is built around stage four and thins out in both directions. That is a description of where the money changes hands, not of where the work happens.

Why does inquiry govern everything downstream?

Because it sets the quality of the brief every later stage runs on. Sofiane Ghorbel treats the first stage as foundational:

"When someone inquires or requests a trip, it would be great to have already all the preferences and the guest history of this client, his taste."

His analogy comes from finance: "It's like in the financial fields when we start doing feasibility studies about the project. We start with what? We start always with the market study ... The inquiry is like the beginning of the process."

He extends the same requirement to the property side. On hotel concierge chatbots failing to produce useful local recommendations, his view is that the missing ingredient was never the model: "If we have an AI tool for that, and we have all the history, the guest history, and the preferences, it'd be so easy to provide them with choices, the right choices, accurate choices."

Where should the software stop?

At the judgment call, and Ghorbel draws that boundary himself:

"We know AI lacks taste. Because luxury is not information, luxury is judgment, luxury is knowing."

"Which hotel fits a family, which destination fits an occasion, which experience fits personality, when not to recommend something. So the most valuable hospitality skills remain human judgment."

His framing of the useful role is that AI does not replace expertise, it accelerates expertise. That is a narrower brief than most travel products are sold on, and it is also a more achievable one.

What does an operator need the product to do?

Stated by the operator:

Cover the full eight-stage workflow, not just booking and its immediate neighbours.
Bring client preferences, history and taste into the inquiry stage automatically.
Be built for hospitality professionals rather than adapted from generic tools.
Accelerate expertise rather than substitute for it.
Leave judgment about fit to the human, including the judgment not to recommend something.

Artificial Reality would add three. Carry context forward between stages, because the value of an integrated workflow is that curation knows what inquiry learned. Respect the privacy constraint, since the client data feeding stage one is exactly the data luxury clients are least willing to share. And treat loyalty as a stage with its own tooling, rather than as whatever happens if the trip went well.

What should a builder take from this?

An operator with twenty-five years across the guest, operator, owner and investor sides handed the industry a product specification in eight named stages, in order. That is a more precise map of this business than most product teams working in travel have, and it is checkable against any roadmap in an afternoon.

Score the available software against it and the coverage pattern is consistent: strong at booking, decent either side, thin at inquiry, nearly absent at loyalty. The economics explain the shape — booking is where money changes hands, so booking is where software was built. But the stages that determine lifetime value are the two nobody built for. Inquiry decides whether the trip is right. Loyalty decides whether there is another one. Both are relationship work, neither generates a transaction, and so both were skipped.

One warning before anyone starts at stage one. Inquiry needs precisely the data luxury clients refuse to give, which is why Ghorbel's larger request is a client-owned data architecture rather than a workflow tool. A product that nails all eight stages and assumes someone else solved consent has built a fast machine with nothing to put in it. Start at loyalty instead: it is the least-served stage, it is where he says repeat business is created, and it runs on knowledge you already have.