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Thin
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AI critical analysis and hospitality technology — written by Rafael del Castillo from Granada.

Two tracks: the hard questions about AI strategy that nobody is asking, and the practical evidence from building real tools inside hotels.

Recent pieces

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SO Labs

Building a Hotel BI Platform with Claude, Vanna AI, and €40/month

Five pages, a live SQL agent, and a revenue briefing that updates with every filter change. Here's what it took, what it cost, and what it proved.

Mar 202612 min
SO Labs

The Rate Shopper Nobody Wanted to Build

Five competitors. Five data architectures. Zero standardisation. How we built live rate intelligence for an Alps ski resort group — and what it revealed about building for Meridian.

Apr 202612 min
AI Analysis

The 88% Problem: Your Hotel Has Adopted AI. Now What?

88% of organisations have adopted AI. Agent deployment is still below 10%. The gap between those two numbers is the most expensive misconception in hospitality right now.

Apr 20269 min
Infrastructure

Why Hotel Groups Don't Need a Data Lakehouse

The lakehouse is a primitive, not a product. Hotel groups at ten to a hundred properties need the assembled thing — and that product category barely exists yet.

Apr 20268 min
AI Analysis

Hotel AI Implementation: What Actually Works and What Doesn't

Hotel AI fails at a remarkable rate — not because the technology is bad, but because the organisation wasn't ready. Here's what ready actually looks like.

Apr 202611 min
AI Analysis

The AI Reality Check for Hospitality Leaders

Why 95% of AI initiatives fail in hospitality — and the three things that actually separate the projects that stick from the ones that stall at pilot.

Feb 20268 min
Keynote

From Hype to Architecture: What I Said at FITUR TechY 2026

The technology is not the problem. The architecture underneath it is. What I argued on stage at FITUR TechY in Madrid — and why the sequencing question matters more than the tool selection.

Jan 20265 min
Hospitality

Revenue Management in the Age of AI Agents

What changes when the morning briefing writes itself, the booking curve interprets itself, and the question you didn't think to ask still gets answered.

Jan 20267 min
AI Analysis

What Vanna AI Actually Does (And What It Doesn't)

The SQL layer is real and reliable. The narrative layer is not Vanna's job. Here's the precise architecture of a tool many people misunderstand.

Jan 20265 min
Hospitality

The Problem With Hotel Tech Stacks in 2026

PMS, CRS, channel manager, RMS — and now AI on top of all of it. The stack isn't the problem. The logic underneath it is.

Dec 20259 min
Keynote

What AI Actually Threatens in Tourism — and What It Doesn't

The threats are real and specific. So are the opportunities. What I argued at eMascaró WOW Canarias in Tenerife — and the three-horizon framework for acting on both.

Jun 20256 min
SO Labs

From Concept to Running Tool in Three Weeks

The build log for the hotel BI dashboard. What broke, what surprised us, and what the €40/month architecture actually looks like.

Dec 20256 min
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