Never Fall in Love with Ideas. Simone Puorto Interviewed on Tasto9
Simone Puorto has been featured on Tasto9, the Italian podcast by Bee Family dedicated to the stories of professionals connected to the hospitality world.
Hosted by Emilio Zorini, the episode moves through Puorto’s personal and professional trajectory, deliberately avoiding a narrow, purely operational definition of hospitality. The conversation frames hospitality as a field defined by decisions, mistakes, people, metrics, and trade-offs, rather than a single discipline or a fixed set of best practices.
One of the opening themes is intellectual mobility as a professional duty, especially in an industry shaped by technology and accelerated change. Puorto’s message is explicit and repeated throughout the conversation:
Never fall in love with ideas. Learn to unlearn.
He also defines his approach to teaching in similarly disruptive terms:
My job as an educator isn’t to teach anything. It’s to unteach.
From there, the conversation traces formative influences that sit outside hospitality. Puorto discusses childhood, music, and the development of an obsessive listening practice, alongside early philosophical curiosity and a parallel attraction to horror literature, described as a gateway into words and, eventually, into academic philosophy. He also offers a self-portrait built on plurality rather than consistency, suggesting there are so many versions of Simone,
and framing his identity as evolving across different eras rather than a linear career path.
A major section of the interview focuses on the limits of expertise and the risks of consensus. Puorto describes himself as an antenna that picks up and amplifies possibilities,
then expands the idea into a working method: staying attentive, seeking rooms where he is not the smartest person, and exposing himself to viewpoints that contradict his own. In his words, the long-term goal is to avoid ideological rigidity, reaching the final stage of enlightenment, which is having no point of view at all.
The practical implication for consulting is direct: when clients ask for an opinion, Puorto resists the premise and redirects toward evidence, hypotheses, and measurable outcomes, repeating that the real anchor is data, not personal authority.
The episode also includes a concrete origin story that connects philosophy, work, and early hotel technology. While supporting himself at university, Puorto worked night shifts at a hotel managed by Trappist monks, which was far from digitized, relying on paper-based room planning. Faced with an operational workload that competed with study time, he describes writing a rudimentary proto PMS in 1999 as a survival tactic to reclaim hours for learning, an example that anticipates his later focus on systems, workflows, and operational leverage.
Later, the conversation shifts into management and the ethics of consulting. Puorto recounts his time as a General Manager and the tension between being effective in product, brand, and data, while finding the human side of operations more difficult, a turning point that eventually led him away from the operational path. In the consulting section, the ethical critique becomes explicit, including a hard rejection of business models where many clients receive only minutes of attention while paying premium retainers. That experience is presented as a personal threshold, the moment when he couldn’t look at himself in the mirror anymore,
and the rationale for building a boutique approach based on fewer clients, higher involvement, and transparency.
A final theme speaks to education, technology literacy, and what Puorto calls cognitive pollution among children. The argument is not generational stereotyping, but interface design as the real variable. He suggests that simplified graphical interfaces can create a dangerous illusion of competence, as users can trigger outputs without understanding the inputs, causality, or the underlying systems. In one provocative passage, he says that if you give a tablet to an orangutan, it will be able to use it after a while,
then uses the image to challenge common assumptions about youth and technological fluency. The advice that follows returns to the opening principle, aimed at students and professionals alike:
Never fall in love with your ideas. Learn to unlearn.
because the moment an idea becomes identity, objectivity collapses.
The interview is available in 2 versions:
AI translated version (via HeyGen)
Original Italian version
About Travel Singularity
Travel Singularity is a consultancy firm for hotels and travel technology providers whose vision is to solve the growing need for connecting the dots between digital disruption and existing technology. Founded in 2017 as a partnership of educational consultants, the firm actively supports cooperation between biological and artificial staff and advocates for an open, collaborative, hyper-connected industry where humans can flourish and innovate, free from the repetitive tasks they are now obliged to perform daily. Its founder, Simone Puorto, is a journalist specializing in tech, keynote speaker, podcaster, consultant, published author of four best sellers on marketing, writer for the main industry blogs, Metaverse Ambassador, co-organizer of the first-ever travel and hospitality event in the metaverse (#HNmetameetup), crypto evangelist, MBA lecturer and CMO for TelltheHotel and E23 Delivery. He often refers to himself as a "Renaissance Futurist," supporting post-human, anti-speciesists, and transhumanist values. Over his career, spanning over 20 years, he consulted for hundreds of international hotel groups, travel tech vendors, and startups. For more information visit: www.travelsingularity.com
