Hospitality

How Sofiane Ghorbel would use VR to start the relationship earlier

A luxury hospitality CEO wants clients to meet their concierge in a headset before booking. Every VR travel product ships the room without the person.

Sofiane Ghorbel, founder and CEO of AL Hospitality Group with more than twenty-five years in luxury hospitality, wants a client to put on a headset, explore two or three candidate destinations, and meet the people who would host them there — before booking anything. He states plainly that the product does not exist. Every VR travel platform Artificial Reality identified ships the room and leaves out the person.

What exactly did the operator ask for?

He places the request at two specific stages of the workflow, not across the whole trip.

"Let's say the discovery, the second — after inquiry we have the discovery or the curation ... In this step of discovery [and] curation we can use ... augmented reality, the AR and the VR."

He is explicit that this is a request rather than a description of anything available:

"We don't have this tool now. But in the future I hope that we will have it — when the goggles, the Apple goggles, will be more democratized and cheaper."

What the client should be able to do:

"They can discover the destination, or two or three destinations, with the goggles. They can even meet people there in the destination."

Who, specifically: "The team, or some of the providers, or maybe a tour guide, or maybe the hotel concierge." And the nature of it: "They will get in direct relation with people there on site, virtually ... it's like an immersive experience."

There is a variant for clients who care about impact: "For people who [are] luxury travelers who are sensitive about impact, [they can] get connected to some villages or some people that will be funded for their social work." His view of the effect is that "the world will be smaller, people will be interconnected more easily, and this could be done before the real travel."

Why is this a meeting rather than a virtual tour?

Because the distinguishing feature is interaction, not rendering. A virtual tour is an asynchronous recording of a space: you look around, but nobody is there. What Sofiane Ghorbel describes is synchronous and social — the concierge is present, and the client can talk to them. Those are two different products built on overlapping technology.

Strip the hardware away and he is not asking for virtual reality at all. He is asking for the relationship to start earlier. The consistent thread across his interview is that luxury hospitality sells trust and that trust is built by people. The VR request follows that logic exactly: the point is not a photorealistic suite, it is that the client meets the concierge who will look after them before committing to anything.

What would the product have to do?

Stated by the operator:

Let a client explore two or three candidate destinations, not just one property.
Support live interaction with people on the ground — concierge, guide, providers, team.
Sit in the discovery and curation stages, before booking.
Work on consumer headsets as they become cheaper and more widespread.
Optionally connect impact-minded clients with the communities or projects they might fund.

Artificial Reality would add three requirements the operator did not state. Keep the advisor in the session, because this is a curation tool rather than a self-serve booking channel and the advisor reading the client's reaction is where the value sits. Represent the property honestly, since a client who arrives to something materially different from the preview has had trust broken in a business where trust is the product. And capture what the client responded to.

What is the second opportunity here?

Preference data, collected without asking for it. A curation session in a headset generates signal continuously — where the client lingers, what they skip, what they ask about — and it does so without handing a discreet luxury client a form.

That matters because the central constraint in this industry is that clients will not surrender preference data directly. Observed reaction during a preview may be the most viable consent-compatible collection method available, and it is a byproduct nobody in this category is currently capturing. Artificial Reality rates this higher than the headline request.

What should a builder take from this?

The missing half already exists in component form. Video calls work. Spatial video calling in headsets works. Nobody has assembled it into a product for travel, because the category was framed as marketing content rather than as a meeting — so every entrant built the room and skipped the person.

The honest caveat belongs in the same paragraph as the opportunity. Ghorbel himself ties this to hardware, expecting it once goggles become more democratized and cheaper, and describes it as a future capability rather than a current one. Treat it as a strategic bet with a hardware dependency, not a market that exists today.

If you are already building in immersive commerce, the specific move is smaller than a new product: add a live participant to a session you can already host, and sell it to advisors as a first meeting rather than a tour.