Hospitality booking and recommendation platform PRIMA has named Gil Antolin, founder of luxury travel media brand Luxury World Traveler, as a strategic partner charged with scaling its two-sided network of hospitality providers and demand-generation partners.
The appointment signals a deliberate push by PRIMA to grow both sides of its marketplace simultaneously — adding more restaurants, nightlife venues, wellness operators, and experience providers on the supply side, while deepening the roster of concierges, travel professionals, residential communities, and content creators who surface those properties to consumers. The platform's core mechanic converts trusted word-of-mouth recommendations into attributable bookings, with distribution partners earning a share of the revenue those bookings generate — a take-rate model that aligns incentives across the network.
Why Antolin
Antolin brings a rare combination of reach and operational depth to the role. Since founding Luxury World Traveler in 2013, he has built a global luxury travel media and marketing brand with more than 5 million social-media followers and has consulted for more than 2,000 hotels worldwide. He has organized over 30 influencer marketing events globally and co-founded two AI-powered hospitality software companies — Worldie AI and M2Lux — giving him direct experience in the technology stack that hospitality operators are adopting to improve guest experience and back-office efficiency.
"The future of hospitality is not technology replacing human connection; it is technology making that connection more valuable," Antolin said. "PRIMA applies AI and intelligent commerce to one of the oldest and most powerful forces in hospitality: trust."
The Platform Model
PRIMA's architecture sits at the intersection of several converging trends in hospitality tech: the rise of creator-driven commerce, the industry's growing demand for booking attribution beyond OTA channels, and the broader push to make concierge-style recommendations scalable and measurable. Where traditional OTA models charge hotels a commission on rooms, PRIMA extends attribution logic to restaurants, nightlife, and experiences — categories that have historically lacked a structured distribution layer.
Alex Zhardanovsky, founder of PRIMA, positioned the platform as infrastructure rather than a discovery app. "We are building the infrastructure that turns those recommendations into measurable business," he said. The revenue-sharing model is designed to give non-traditional distribution partners — creators, residential concierges, travel advisors — a financial stake in the bookings they influence, addressing a longstanding gap in loyalty and CRM strategy for independent operators.
For restaurant and hotel operators already navigating fragmented digital ordering and reservation platforms, PRIMA's proposition is channel diversification with attribution visibility — knowing which recommendation source drove a cover or a room night without paying OTA-level commissions. Antolin's network of hospitality relationships and his experience co-founding AI hospitality software companies positions him to negotiate integrations and partnerships that require both technical credibility and industry trust.
The company has published a whitepaper outlining its network and economic model, signaling it is building toward broader platform adoption rather than a single-market rollout.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
