For decades, the hospitality industry has invested heavily in technology designed to make hotels run more efficiently. Property management systems organize reservations. Revenue management software adjusts pricing. CRM platforms track guest information. Housekeeping applications streamline operations. Yet despite billions of dollars spent on hospitality technology, many hotel employees still begin their day juggling dozens of disconnected systems, manually piecing together information that already exists somewhere inside the organization.
Lucía Marí Sanguino believes that disconnect has become one of hospitality’s biggest obstacles. As the CEO and co-founder of AIVA, she and co-founder Paula Rodriguez are building what they describe as an AI-native intelligence layer for hotels, software designed not to replace the human side of hospitality, but to give it the information it has always been missing. Following a $1.5 million pre-seed funding round led by Comma Capital and 645 Ventures, AIVA is betting that the next generation of hospitality technology will not be defined by automation alone, but by intelligence that connects every part of a hotel’s operation into one unified system.
For Marí Sanguino, however, the company did not begin with artificial intelligence. It began years earlier, standing behind the front desk of a hotel.
Hospitality Is About People, Not Software
Growing up around hotels, Marí Sanguino learned that the industry’s greatest competitive advantage had never been luxury amenities or elaborate buildings. The best hotels created memorable experiences because of the people inside them. Employees remembered returning guests, anticipated needs before they were expressed, and built relationships that transformed a stay into something personal.
Those early experiences shaped how she viewed hospitality, but it was only after becoming a hotel manager herself that she realized how much of that personal connection was being sacrificed to administrative work.
Every morning began with the same routine. Before she could even think about speaking with guests or supporting her staff, she found herself opening dozens of browser tabs across reservation systems, operational dashboards, guest profiles, revenue reports, maintenance requests, and market data. Hours were spent manually connecting information that already existed, simply because none of the systems communicated with one another.
“There was so much richness in the data,” she says. “But there was very little ability to leverage it because the connections simply weren’t being made.”
The irony was difficult to ignore. The moments that made her job meaningful were the conversations with employees and guests. Instead, much of her day disappeared trying to uncover patterns hidden inside fragmented technology.
“The most valuable part of my job was spending time with my staff and with guests because happy staff creates happy guests,” she explains. “Instead, I was wasting time trying to make correlations that were almost humanly impossible to make between disconnected data points. If we could automate that work, we’d create better decision making while giving people more time to actually focus on hospitality.”
That realization became the foundation for AIVA.
The Industry Doesn’t Have an Operations Problem. It Has an Intelligence Problem.
At first glance, hotels appear to have no shortage of technology. In reality, Marí Sanguino argues, they have too much of the wrong kind.
The average hotel relies on roughly fifteen different software platforms to operate its business. Property management systems oversee reservations. Revenue management platforms optimize pricing. CRM tools manage guest information. Separate software handles housekeeping, maintenance, food and beverage operations, and guest messaging. Each application was built to solve a specific challenge, but almost none were designed to work seamlessly together.
The result is a business overflowing with information but lacking a unified understanding of what that information actually means.
Marí Sanguino describes hotel data as existing inside three separate worlds. One contains guest information. Another tracks operational performance. A third captures external market conditions such as weather, seasonality, and local demand. Valuable insights exist within each of those categories, but the real opportunity lies in connecting them.
“The insights don’t communicate,” she explains. “The value comes from integrating those different buckets of information into one version of the truth.”
Until recently, even that was nearly impossible.
For years, many property management systems operated on-premises with limited connectivity. Cloud infrastructure and modern APIs have only recently become standard across hospitality, creating the technical foundation that allows AI-native companies like AIVA to exist.
“Applications like ours couldn’t have been built before because you simply couldn’t extract the data and connect all of those different systems,” she says. “Now the infrastructure finally exists.”
Connecting the Dots Before Guests Notice They’re Missing
The consequences of fragmented information extend far beyond operational inefficiency. According to Marí Sanguino, hotels lose revenue, reduce guest satisfaction, and create unnecessary work simply because they cannot recognize patterns quickly enough.
She offers a scenario that illustrates the opportunity.
Imagine a luxury resort in the Caribbean. A sudden rainstorm pushes every guest indoors. AIVA recognizes that the complimentary buffet will soon exceed capacity while, at the very same moment, the hotel’s premium Japanese restaurant remains less than half full. At the same time, the platform identifies dozens of guests whose previous dining behavior suggests they value culinary experiences.
Without intervention, many of those guests will wait in long buffet lines, leave frustrated, or spend money elsewhere.
Instead, AIVA can proactively reach out through AI agents, offering personalized incentives to dine at the underutilized restaurant. What could have become a disappointing experience instead becomes a premium dining experience for the guest and additional revenue for the hotel.
“It’s about turning missed moments into opportunities,” Marí Sanguino explains. “You’re improving the guest experience while simultaneously increasing revenue because the system understands what’s happening across the property in real time.”
That philosophy extends well beyond restaurant recommendations. Whether optimizing housekeeping schedules, predicting maintenance issues, or identifying opportunities for personalized upgrades, the company’s goal is to continuously connect signals that humans would struggle to recognize on their own.
Giving Independent Hotels Enterprise Intelligence
Perhaps the most exciting implication of AI, according to Marí Sanguino, is not what it enables for global hotel chains, but what it makes possible for everyone else.
Companies like Marriott and Hilton possess enormous competitive advantages because they collect data across thousands of properties. Smaller independent hotels rarely have access to those same insights.
AI changes that equation.
“What AI allows smaller hotels to do is behave more like the largest hotel brands,” she says. “They can gather insights, understand guests better, and make decisions with the same level of intelligence even without having the same scale.”
If AIVA succeeds, the future of hospitality may look surprisingly familiar.
Guests will still remember exceptional employees more than software. Hotel managers will still focus on creating memorable experiences. The difference is that, behind the scenes, intelligence will quietly connect thousands of invisible signals, allowing every interaction to feel a little more thoughtful, a little more personal, and a little more human.
For Marí Sanguino, that has always been the goal. Technology should not replace hospitality. It should give hospitality the freedom to be itself again.
