Some of the most advanced hotel technology in Spain is designed in an office on a quiet street in Sant Antoni. Behind it is José María Ramón Cardona, born in Ibiza in 1977, who has spent more than twenty years building the systems that let hotels sell their rooms directly to guests, and who is now betting that the next booking will happen inside an AI assistant.
A computer in the sewing room
Ramón studied computer management at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. When he came home to Ibiza, his plan was modest: build websites for any business that needed one. His mother lent him the room where she did her sewing, and he set up there with a single computer.
The clients that kept coming back were hotels. They didn’t just want a website: they needed to update availability and bookings constantly, and that led Ramón to write a system to handle it. Neobookings was officially launched in 2004, and two people who had worked with him became his partners. “It was a very small thing at the start,” he says. “I never thought it would grow to this size.”
Growing by word of mouth
For years the company barely had a sales team. Growth came from hoteliers recommending it to each other, and from listening to what they asked for. Ramón admits that Neobookings only began selling professionally very late. Today it has around 50 employees, works with more than 800 hotels and has offices in Mexico and Colombia. Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 programme has listed it among the most promising tech companies in Spain.
Its products cover what a hotel needs to sell online without depending on the big booking platforms: a booking engine, a channel manager, payments and price monitoring, plus web design and marketing.
“We Ibizans have a bit of a complex”
Ramón is quick to defend the island’s hotel sector, which he considers one of the most advanced he has worked with. In Ibiza, he points out, between 15% and 35% of bookings are made directly with the hotel, compared with around 3% in Latin America. But he also believes islanders tend to undervalue their own talent. “We Ibizans have a bit of a complex,” he says, convinced that local expertise is too often overlooked in favour of outsiders.
The AI turn
For Ramón, the problem with artificial intelligence in hotels is not the technology. “The technology is already available,” he says. “It only takes the courage to implement it.” The real obstacle, in his view, is that a hotel’s systems don’t talk to each other: the chatbot, the review assistant and the switchboard each keep their own information. His advice to hoteliers is simple: strategy first, tools second.
His company’s latest product puts that idea into practice. NeoGPT lets guests book a room inside ChatGPT or Claude, choosing dates, rooms and extras and paying through the hotel’s own system, so that the sale and the relationship with the guest stay with the hotel. Neobookings says no other system on the market offers the full booking process inside these assistants.
From a sewing room in Ibiza to the frontier of AI travel booking, Ramón’s story is, in a way, his own answer to the island’s complex.
