Vibe Coding and Hospitality, match made in heaven or disaster lurking?

📰 In This Issue

✔️ Is AI taking over or empowering hotel staff?
✔️ Vibe Coding vs the legends of industry?
✔️ The other side of Vibe Coding.
✔️ Juyo Analytics, connecting the dots…
✔️ What’s the way forward?

🌟 Spotlight: Innovative Tech of the Week

🔍 Here is a 3-minute read by Enzo, often referred to as the smartest man in hotel tech, on how AI is influencing Revenue Management tools: LinkedIn Post.

💡Sphynx – Hotel PMS, built using Vibe Coding, can it compete against the products we know?

Vibe Coding, you ask, here is AI product manager at Hubspot to explain.
(Basically, the ability to tell AI what you want it to build, in theory, an F&B manager can build their own Point-of-Sale using vibe coding and does not need a service provider.)

Let’s compare Sphynx to our local trusted hero, Nightsbridge.

I gave Sphynx a 6/10 last time around. Given that they have been around for 6 months, that’s an impressive score. Nightsbridge has been our hero for 20 years. How do they compare, and if I had a new Guesthouse, which one would I choose?

Sphynx features include a booking engine, an online check-in app with upselling, which doubles up as a guest app in-house. Good start👍🏽 Profile, Reservation, OTA, and rate management included. Getting better👏🏾 An Analytics dashboard and basic reporting with accounting exports. What more do you need?

NightsBridge comes with a booking engine and channel manager that is synonymous with travel in South Africa. From personal experience, the calendar, profiles, and reports are simple and easy to manage. More recently, they have added payments, a guest app, Xero, Google ads, and a Point of Sale. Starting to sound like an all-in-one solution.

At face value, some differences in features, nothing that you can’t get around. Impressive for a product that’s been built in 6 months vs 20 years.

Let’s look at the three major differences:

1) Quality of features: Yes, Vibe coding will build you a feature as good as you can describe it. 20 Years of industry experience will build features that give properties the edge over competitors.

2) Integrations: No matter how much marketing the all-in-one companies throw at you, they are never all-in-one; they all need integrations. Points for NightsBridge! The speed at which integrations are built can change this very quickly. Relationships become the winner in this game.

3) Trust: The deciding factor that smashes all other deciding factors. Trust is a strange thing, and each buyer has their idea on how to trust and when to trust. Marketers will have a say in trust. Customer testimonials. Skin in the game. All contributors to trust. It might take a while, but I’ve seen numerous companies build trust quickly.

🚀 Luckily, I don’t own a guesthouse, so I’m leaving this decision to those who do.

My two cents. Put Vibe coding in the hands of an experienced, driven, motivated team who understand the challenges of hospitality operators, and a winning product will emerge.

Existing companies that don’t embrace the advantages of AI and how it impacts software development will become forgotten.

😂 Meme of the Week

🎯 Sponsored Ad

It’s five minutes before the morning meeting, and you want to know the total spending per customer for the previous seven days, focusing on OTA bookings versus direct bookings. How? 

Juyo Analytics allows you to effortlessly create dashboards by dragging and dropping data from your PMS, POS, and accounting systems. With just a few clicks, you can dive deep into segments, dates, stays, and more.

Open your Juyo dashboard, drag and drop a few data points, and within three clicks, you have your answer. Morning meetings will never be the same again…

📌 Final Thoughts & What’s Coming Next

✨ AI, Vibe Coding, and Bots are all here to stay and get better at crazy speeds. Don’t fall for marketing jargon. Be informed, and make good decisions about the future of hotel technology for your business.
🔮 Next time, Digital Marketing and who is who in the zoo.
📩 If you like this newsletter, share it with a friend. If not, please tell us what we can do better.