Rafael de Jorge on Hotelinking: "Investing in technology matters as much as training people to use it"

Hotelinking has published an interview with Rafael de Jorge, founder and CEO of Growtur, covering his view on innovation, training and technology in the tourism industry. One sentence sums up what we have been arguing at Growtur for years: "investing in technology matters just as much as training people to use it."

Knowledge as a multiplier

Rafael explains it with an image anyone gets instantly: a Formula 1 team buys the best car on the market and crashes on the first lap. Technology alone delivers no return.

"In the classic production function — capital, labour and other factors — we should now add knowledge as a multiplier of labour. Knowledge multiplies what technology can do."

That is exactly what we see today in destinations and tourism companies working with Artificial Intelligence: licences purchased, tools deployed, and teams that never use them because nobody taught them what for or how.

It is not a lack of investment: it is misdirected investment

Another core idea: the industry does not suffer so much from a lack of innovation spending as from spending in the wrong place.

"Not everything labelled innovation actually is. That is why training and education must focus on teaching what and where to invest in."

The same warning applies to generative AI. Many projects fail out of sheer unfamiliarity: technology is bought with no prior diagnosis, no measurable goals and nobody in-house able to sustain the project once the consultancy ends.

Everything must be measurable

Growth marketing — the methodological foundation Growtur was born from — rests on three legs: creativity, technology and analysis. And on one non-negotiable rule: every action must be quantifiable.

It is the same principle behind our GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) audits today: measuring a brand's real visibility inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot, and working from data rather than intuition.

Ethics as a pillar of training

The interview devotes significant space to ethics, which Rafael places at the core of the school:

"We teach people to work with technology, but we are not teaching them how to work with it properly and for the common good."

In the era of generative models that conversation has become even more urgent: bias, source traceability, responsible use of traveller data, and transparency about when a machine is talking and when a person is.

What we take away

Five years on from when many of these ideas were first put on the table, the thesis holds. Only the technology of the day has changed: today it is called Artificial Intelligence.

• Technology + people, always together. Never one without the other.
• Applied training, built on real cases from the business itself.
• Measurement from day one, or it is not a project: it is an expense.
• Ethics and judgement, to tell real innovation from hot air.

👉 Read the full interview on the Hotelinking blog.

If you want to work on both legs — technology and knowledge — in your destination or company, take a look at our training programmes or get in touch.