The Best Part of Travel | Inside the Business of Destination Experiences Curation, Customer Obsession & Competing Differently: Inside Civitatis with CEO Andres Spitzer
In this season premiere of The Best Part of Travel, Arival CEO and co-founder Douglas Quinby sits down with Andres Spitzer, the newly appointed CEO of Civitatis — the leading OTA for Spanish and Portuguese-speaking travelers. With a background spanning entrepreneurship and Amazon, Andres brings a fresh, tech-forward perspective to one of the experiences sector's most distinctive platforms. From radical curation to AI-powered personalization, this is a conversation packed with insights for any operator or industry professional thinking about where the market is headed in 2026 and beyond.
🗺️ Topics we cover:
What makes Civitatis different: Why Civitatis operates as a curated platform — not an open bazaar — and what that means in practice: 37 Colosseum listings versus thousands on other platforms, and why that's very much by design.
Curation in action: Civitatis rejects 70–80% of the activities it receives. Andres breaks down what operators need to know about what gets in — and what gets turned away.
What it takes to succeed on Civitatis: The two things operators who "crush it" on the platform have in common — operational excellence and deep cultural sensitivity for Spanish and Portuguese-speaking travelers.
The OTA–operator tension (and the flywheel): How Andres reframes the perennial tension between platforms and operators, drawing on Amazon's flywheel concept and Civitatis' partner-first approach.
Lessons from Amazon: What Andres actually brought from his time leading product and tech for Amazon Business — and it's not what you'd expect. Hint: it's less about logistics and more about customer obsession.
AI as a superpower, not a replacement: How Civitatis is thinking about AI — not to cut headcount, but to give people superpowers, from voice-to-voice multilingual customer support to personalized feedback reports for operators.
The future of discovery and hyper-personalization: Why conversational AI is fundamentally changing how travelers search for experiences, and what that means for operators and platforms alike.
Growth, profitability and the long game: Why Civitatis is proud to have been profitable from day one, its aggressive growth in Latin America, and how it's thinking about scale without sacrificing quality.
Learn more with these resources:
🔗 Global Operator Landscape Report — featuring new data on the growing role of OTAs in operator revenue
🔗 Upcoming Arival Events — Valencia, Brisbane & Spokane
The Best Part of Travel podcast is brought to you by Arival. Season Three is sponsored by Protect Group.