Thank you
Jordi
Barcelona, March 2026
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You don’t know what you started.
We got split into two groups on the Montserrat tour. You weren’t our assigned guide — we ended up in your half by chance. We started talking toward the end of the day. Not networking. Not angling. Just conversation.
Then you said you had the next day off. And you offered to spend it showing us Barcelona.
I questioned it at first. A stranger offering his day off to two people he just met. But I read you as genuine. We said yes.
That decision changed everything.
This is the Barcelona you showed us. Every rooftop, every corner, every story.
Her first time in Europe. Your city was the last stop. It became the most important one.
E-bikes around the entire city. Our last day, covering everything we hadn’t gotten to. You shared your personal love for each spot along the way.
The religious history. The spiritual history. The war history. You walked us through all of it — not like a guide reading a script, but like someone showing their home to people they wanted to understand it.
You knew when to lead and when to step back. You watched our bikes while giving us time to explore on our own. You read the moment every time.
Then you set us up at your favorite restaurant in the city. Walked to the bar. Paid for our meal. And left without making it a thing.
That gesture — quiet, unprompted, without expectation — is the hardest thing in the world to systematize. And it’s the most important thing to get right.
We didn’t ask. You just saw the moment and captured it.
This was her first time in Europe. We’d come from Rome, where we watched the Pope’s procession during the Jubilee Year. We’d survived Spirit Airlines canceling our Lima flights and a last-minute scramble to rebook this rooftop in Spanish. And then we looked up and saw this.
This is now the hero image of our website. The first thing anyone sees.
You told us to come back and visit. We haven’t forgotten.
When we got home, I had a conversation with a friend who was leaving for study abroad in Madrid the next day. He had no plan. No framework. No one to show him the city the way you showed us Barcelona.
That night, my best friend Dawson and I decided to build something.
An AI-powered travel intelligence platform. We take the thing you did naturally in one day — deep personal knowledge of a place, shared freely, knowing when to lead and when to get out of the way — and we systematize it into destination frameworks that anyone can use.
Every recommendation is validated from firsthand experience. Every cost is real. Every spot has been walked, eaten at, or drunk in by at least one of us. We don’t scrape review sites. We build from trips we’ve actually taken.
Barcelona has 55 spots in our database. Your Montserrat day trip is rated 10 out of 10. The note in our system reads: “Friends with tour guide.”
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22. Grand Valley State University — double major in Data Science and Economics. I built machine learning models for Farmers Insurance, taught myself to code, and spent my junior year as a peer advisor at the university’s international center helping students plan study abroad trips.
That’s where the obsession started. I kept seeing students leave for Europe with no plan, no local knowledge, and no one in their corner. They’d come back and say “I wish someone had told me.”
My best friend Dawson and I have traveled together since we were 20. Dublin at Christmas. Rome during the Jubilee Year. Barcelona with you. Every trip, we took notes. Built spreadsheets. Rated every pub, restaurant, and hostel. Mapped the day trips that were worth the money and the ones that weren’t.
After your day with us, I realized those notes weren’t just for us. They were a product. And the way you delivered it — personal, generous, honest — was the standard everything should be measured against.
I start at Ford Motor Company in May. The Lads runs on the side. Dawson handles first-touch client intake. A third friend, Stew, does photography. But the frameworks — the research, the design, the intelligence layer — that’s me, working with AI tools that didn’t exist two years ago.
The site was built in 10 days. From zero to 285 spots, 12 frameworks, live analytics, and a 3D globe with every city we’ve visited pinned on it. Your pin is on that globe.
You gave us your Barcelona without asking for anything in return. The restaurant recommendations you’ve kept sending since we left — every one of them has gone into the database.
We’d love to show you what we’re building. And we haven’t forgotten about Costa Brava.