At Arrivedo, I co-founded the company and led product and design. We built a content platform that captures the knowledge traditionally shared at hotel front desks and turns it into digital destination guides · helping travelers discover what to do, while enabling hospitality brands to promote local experiences and increase direct bookings.
Co-founder · Led Product & Technology
Founding team + travel-writer community
Hospitality platform · CMS · API
Content · Local experiences · B2B
50% of guests ask questions at hosts and hotel front desks worldwide · with 1.5 billion people traveling annually · even though they have Google or Tripadvisor on their phones. Questions bombard hotel staff. Billions of answers are still delivered on paper.
This is a massive opportunity for the hospitality industry to capture data on what guests actually want, and to own local experiences through staff knowledge. As Airbnb grew by bundling experiences with a room, hotels could do the same.
A real traveler we interviewed · and a quote that framed the entire product direction.
We defined traveler profiles that matched the most common and frequent guests, and then built research that asked them · and their hosts · why the front-desk conversation kept happening. Competitive analysis showed a clear opening to help hotels digitize their knowledge and stake a claim in the local-experiences business.
Ideas moved from interactive low-fidelity prototypes to 25 potential users across three common profiles. Testing sessions in groups of ten were run through card-sorting exercises to find themes: travelers trusted their hosts, wanted personalized recommendations, and saw value in having a local voice on their experiences.
The result was grouped Neighborhood Guides · built with hotel staff local knowledge and the expertise of travel writers · combined with map zoom-levels that turned reading into self-guided tours.
Arrivedo taught me to build platforms for people who were already doing the work. The front-desk clerk, the concierge, the freelance travel writer · they had all the knowledge; the product's job was to give them a medium and a reason to publish.
We also built a content API to extend the platform. A car manufacturer white-labeled our routes for an adventure-car line, which opened a new business model for us · proof that well-structured domain content outlives the first surface you ship it on.