Fact Sheet
WHAT IT IS
Guest and team intelligence platform for independents
FOUNDED
April 2026
FOUNDER
Benjamin Smith, 20+ years in hospitality across 5 countries
KNOWN FOR
Guest Connection Score®, Service Signature
Original IntuitiveStay Research
JUNE 2026
The Reputation Gap
Independent hotels outrate chains on Google across every UK destination we studied. The gap is +0.46 stars and it holds in all 10 locations.
MAY 2026
The EI Gap
90 UK hospitality job ads across four cities. Zero asked whether a candidate can read a guest's emotional state.
IntuitiveStay Coverage & Mentions
Why the Five Star Hospitality Scoring Review System Is Broken
A guest gives you 3 stars on TripAdvisor, Google, Booking.com, Agoda, or whichever OTA you rely on most. What does that mean? You have no idea. Neither does anyone else.
Beyond NPS: Introducing The Guest Connection Score®. Hospitality's First Emotional Intelligence Benchmark
"The moments that drive loyalty in hospitality are human moments and NPS doesn't measure them.
The Best New Hospitality Technology
"The world's first emotional intelligence credential for hospitality professionals"
The Founder
Benjamin Smith
After more than twenty years in hospitality across five countries, I kept running into the same thing, the higher I climbed, the more I saw the heartbeat of the industry, the human connection a guest actually remembers, treated as an afterthought.
It gets assumed rather than valued, even though it is the foundation of the whole guest experience.
So why build IntuitiveStay now? Because of AI. It is a brilliant tool for our generation and I am all for it but what worries me is watching operators lose focus on what guests actually want, leaning on systems alone. AI should complement the experience, not spearhead it.
In a matter of months I built IntuitiveStay, trademarked my own emotional intelligence metric, the Guest Connection Score®, built an end-to-end SaaS dashboard and created hospitality's first portable staff credential, the Service Signature.
I am nowhere near done. The plan is to grow IntuitiveStay into the platform that brings every guest experience factor into one place, built around emotional intelligence, helping owners reduce staff turnover, lift average spend and cut costs along the way.
Press contact
Benjamin Smith, Founder
Prefer to talk? Book a 20 minute interview slot:
IntuitiveStay Software Inside The Platform
Rules Of Use
Our logos can be used as either the single 'I' in the orange box or as an icon with the IntuitiveStay wordmark in a fixed relationship. Please keep them together and in proportion and do not separate, rearrange or redraw them.
Do not stretch, rotate, recolour or add effects such as shadows or gradients to the logo.
Leave clear space around the logo so no text, images or other elements crowd it.
Use the full-colour logo on light backgrounds and the white logo on dark backgrounds. Both are in the press kit.
Our orange is #f97316 and our dark text colour is #111827.
The wordmark is set in the Inter typeface.
Please write our name as IntuitiveStay, one word with a capital I and a capital S. Not Intuitive Stay, Intuitivestay or intuitivestay.
Our metric is the Guest Connection Score® on first mention, and GCS after that.
Guest Connection Score® is a registered trademark.