Sometime, a picture speaks a thousand words.
In the summer of 2017, as I reminisced about my experience as the VP of IT at the Palms Casino Resort, I found my thoughts drifting to the team I had left behind. The property had been sold to Red Rock Station Casinos a few months prior, and I couldn't help but wonder how the staff—the real heart of the operation—were navigating the transition.
I thrive when I help people; whether it's a staff member, a customer, or a third-party partner, I always answer the call. This drive was behind a project dear to my heart that I had initiated at the Palms. It was an ambitious plan to create truly personalized experiences, and I still felt it was a significant missed opportunity to fundamentally enhance our customer engagement.
I wrote an insightful article for CIO Reviews Magazine titled "The Holy Grail of Customer Itinerary: OpenAI ecosystems and contextual insights" I understood early on the seismic shift that AI would bring to our world, recognizing the incredible benefits we could derive for our customers long before it was mainstream. Back to that hot Vegas summer, I had a question that soon would transform into a quest that felt more urgent as I was perusing another mind-numbing travel website. I wondered what it would be like to travel to India—a place of amazing culture, ancient traditions, vibrant colors, and fantastic food. The sterile booking engines I was using felt completely disconnected from that rich, human reality.
I thought, "These websites are all doing the same thing and look the same", they present a polished but hollow view with endless pictures of pools, beds, lobbies, restaurants and in many cases the same "experiences". Honestly, I always wonder, what is the first thing I will see when I leave the hotel or a rental, especially if take an unexpected turn?. I started to look for pictures that told a real story, and I found one that conveyed everything I needed to know in a single frame. This sparked an idea, and it became a game where the picture was the destination, and vice versa.
Slowly but surely, I started to build a website, convinced I wasn't alone in wanting something more from our traditional travel platforms. The industry felt stagnant. Obviously, many have copied the look and feel of Airbnb due to Jony Ive's involvement, but this often resulted in a fleet of beautiful yet soulless clones that lacked any unique perspective or personality.
Before I knew it, the App became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the journey of a lifetime. I have a deep understanding of the "back of the house" from a hospitality standpoint, but my own travels have taught me so much about the common failures, gaps, and profound detachment that travel websites create for us. They often treat travel as a simple transaction rather than a deeply personal experience. While not all travel websites behave this way, I believe the time has come for a fundamental change hence why I released ZipVoyager.
Ultimately, we all start our own journey for different reasons for which may include romance, culture, adventure or wellness. As such, having gone through my own journey I would have never in a million years thought it would have started this way.
We will share more information in the upcoming weeks. Cheers.