Cutting Through AI Scepticism With Real Outcomes

1. You have been in the vacation rental industry for over 14 years, selling SaaS to operators first at Kigo and now leading growth at Jurny. How has the conversation with property managers changed over that period, and what does it take to convince an operator today to switch their core platform?

Fourteen years in this industry gives you a very specific kind of perspective — you get to watch the maturity curve in real time. When I started at Kigo, most operators were still running their businesses on spreadsheets and manual processes. The conversation was almost entirely about basic automation — getting listings onto multiple channels, avoiding double bookings, automating confirmations. That was genuinely revolutionary at the time. Today those are table stakes. Nobody is impressed by automation anymore.

What’s changed is that operators have become genuinely sophisticated business leaders. They understand yield management, they have strong opinions about AI, they’ve evaluated five or six platforms before they get to me, and they know exactly what questions to ask. That evolution has been remarkable — and it’s accelerated dramatically in the last three to four years.

Switching a core platform today is not a decision any operator takes lightly. It touches everything — channel distribution, guest data, owner relationships, the team’s daily workflows. What it takes to earn that conversation is credibility first, specificity second. You have to demonstrate that you understand their business model at a deep level before you can earn the right to challenge it. The operators who make the switch are the ones who’ve reached a ceiling with their current tools — and our job is to be there when they hit it, and to make the decision feel inevitable rather than risky.

2. Jurny just released NIA 3.0, claiming up to 300% improvement in accuracy compared to earlier versions. As Head of Growth, how do you bring that kind of technical leap to market in a way that resonates with operators who are increasingly sceptical of AI claims?

The scepticism operators have towards AI claims right now is completely valid — and I say that as someone who sells an AI platform for a living. The last two years have produced an extraordinary amount of noise in this space. Every PMS, every channel manager, every messaging tool has added “AI-powered” to their homepage. Most of it is workflow automation dressed up in a new language. Operators have learned to look past the marketing — and they should.

So when we talk about NIA 3.0 and what it genuinely represents — a significant architectural improvement in how the AI understands context, handles ambiguity, and escalates intelligently — the challenge is cutting through that accumulated scepticism with something real.

The approach that works is radical specificity and showing, not telling. Instead of leading with the number, we lead with the scenario. We put operators in front of a real guest conversation — a complex check-in issue at midnight, a guest pushing back on a policy, a last-minute booking inquiry — and let them see exactly how NIA handled it. When you put that in front of someone who has been manually managing those interactions for years, the reaction is immediate. They feel the operational weight it lifts.

The other thing that matters enormously is peer credibility. When a property manager in Miami tells another property manager in Barcelona that NIA resolved 94% of guest inquiries without human intervention last month, that lands differently than anything we could say in a marketing email. In a market flooded with claims, time-stamped outcomes from real operators are the most powerful thing you can put in front of a sceptical buyer. Our job is to create those conversations — and then get out of the way.

3. Jurny targets both short-term rental operators and boutique hotels within the same platform. In practice, how different are those two buyer types in terms of what they need and how they evaluate software?

This is a question I find genuinely fascinating because the surface answer — they’re very different — is true, but it obscures something more interesting underneath.

At the evaluation level, they are quite distinct. STR operators, particularly those running portfolios of 50 to 500 properties, tend to be entrepreneurial in their decision-making. They’re close to the operational pain, they feel it personally, and they evaluate software based on how directly it reduces their daily friction. The conversation moves fast. They want to see guest communication, smart device management, upselling, owner reporting — the things that affect their day before 9am. And they’re usually making the decision themselves, or with one other person.

Boutique hotels are a fundamentally different environment. There are more stakeholders, longer evaluation cycles, and a much stronger emphasis on brand alignment. They think carefully about how every guest touchpoint reflects on their property’s identity — which is where our white label capabilities become central to the conversation. They’re also more likely to have legacy systems and integration requirements that need to be addressed before anything else.

But here’s what I’ve learned from years of conversations with both buyer types: the underlying problem they’re trying to solve is identical. How do I scale the quality of my guest experience without scaling my headcount proportionally? Every operator I’ve spoken to — whether they’re managing 30 villas on the Costa del Sol or running a boutique hotel in Manhattan — is wrestling with the same fundamental tension between growth and quality. The technology conversation is really just a proxy for that deeper question. And when you frame it that way, the platform sells itself.

4. You have spent your entire career based in Barcelona, building relationships across Spanish-speaking and international markets. In a sector dominated by US-headquartered companies, what advantages does operating from Europe actually give you?

It gives you something genuinely difficult to replicate from a headquarters in Miami or San Francisco — ground-level fluency in markets that behave very differently from the US.

The European short-term rental landscape is structurally more complex. The regulatory environment varies dramatically not just country by country but city by city — Barcelona, Amsterdam, Florence, Lisbon have all implemented restrictions that fundamentally change how operators think about their portfolios. The OTA mix is different. The cultural expectations around hospitality are different. And operators here tend to be internationally oriented by necessity — managing multi-language guest communication, multi-currency owner statements, multi-market distribution from day one. That’s not a complexity they chose. It’s the baseline.

Having spent my career embedded in that environment, first at Kigo and now at Jurny, means I’m not translating a US product for a European market — I’m helping build a global product with European operator needs built in from the ground up.

There’s also something less tangible but equally important — the relationship dimension. This industry runs on trust and personal connection more than almost any other SaaS vertical I can think of. Operators talk to each other constantly. They share vendor experiences, recommend platforms, warn each other about bad migrations. Being physically present, showing up at the right events, speaking the language — not just linguistically but culturally — builds a quality of relationship that is very hard to establish remotely. And in a space that is evolving as rapidly as ours right now, that trust is the most valuable currency you have.