Vila Vita Parc, Bruno mateus & Hugo Serôdio

Vilavita park is a very special place to be and work. We are an independent luxury beach resort on the Algarve coast. What makes us unique is our layered ecosystem. We have big amount of different types of rooms with ocean view, villas, suites. Our mission is to deliver to our guests our Portuguese hospitality. We always try our best to have the most excellent service and that is actually one of the things that makes us stand out.

In what ways has Vila Vita Parc integrated technology beyond traditional digital marketing?

We are now facing like all this technology and specifically AI. We've always taken care in terms of introducing new technologies on the hotel. We don't want to lose the human touch. And so we always try to figure out the best technologies that can enhance us, especially on the back of office and that can improve operations, marketing strategy and that doesn't affect too much that loss of human touch that sometimes can happen.

What was the most valuable insight gained from the AI program and workshops we conducted with Influence Society?

The biggest takeaway was how context matters and how well problems need to be defined so that good goals can be achieved by the AI. For many of my colleagues that also attended the training sessions, they were not aware of that and it's something that is not to explain that made a big difference in the way that they started to approach AI and make them much more efficient in using any AI tool that they started to use afterwards. But I would like to reinforce again the importance of building a strong digital narrative. It's a mirror of our brand assets and what actually the client is expecting from us. It's important to listen to our audience.

Wich digital channels have proven to be the most effective for engaging with your luxury clientele?

At Vilavita, we don't see technology or AI as a trend. We use it as a tool to go deeper on our guests experience, to anticipate, to understand their needs. And also of course now it's possible with all this technology to collect a lot of data. We use those channels in a really effective way with an amazing team. It is imperative to use AI to streamline the workload, to suggest some new ideas outside of our common realm. Of course, always under the guidance of our expertise digital concierge, where you can actually support your clients and be more personalized and on demand. I think that's also great to have. Also in terms of pre arrival suggest personalized experiences according to each client profile. It's helping us to to streamline.

Wich emerging digital trends do you foresee shaping the luxury hospitality industry, and how are you preparing for them?

One of the biggest trends I'm seeing and foreseeing in the hospitality sector is hyper personalization or personalization at scale. It's something that will improve the way that guests will experience the hotel even before they arrive to the hotel. Through the parsing of AI, well written AI agents, we can actually improve and give a human touch to key point in our communication with our guests that will improve tremendously, either through better profiling or categorization, just looking at the history, or to just suggest new things, like new experiences, according to the latest history of the guest, we can be proactive. And even before the guest asks us for something, our team, our hospitality team, can actually reach them and immediately suggest to them things that will be hard to turn off.

How do you envision the role of AI evolving in luxury hospitality, particulary at Vila Vita Parc?

Personalization in scale. It's crucial because this is how you work in luxury, like I mentioned before, anticipating the client needs and you will feel more connected with the brand. At Vilavita park, we are experimenting with generating our own internal LLMs for security measures with small agents that will try to improve small tools that our colleagues can actually use. And they will go as far as reading our database, trying to understand who's a VIP or not. If a customer is having a problem, but he's silent about it, all of those kind of minute things that can actually improve and reach and get us to the next level. And you can think ahead of the experiences you can actually offer. What are the gaps in the market that actually you can solve and bring to your client, your guests? So we are paying attention to all this and developing technology that can either help us in offering better experiences to guests, but also internally, it can also really improve and be more efficient in our interdepartment workflows and processes. Vilavita is the oldest CRM. We have the oldest CRM, that's people we met, people that have been here for like 30 years or since the beginning. So personalization and customized experience experience is actually something we are doing since ever. But of course, now, with the help of technology,

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