HN Original: When ChatGPT Can Prove Your Hotel Is Clean: A Conversation with Valpas at ITB Berlin

At ITB Berlin, Simone Puorto spoke with Martim Gois, Founder of Valpas, about a problem that has followed hospitality for decades and the infrastructure that is finally solving it at scale. The conversation covered bedbug prevention, pesticide-free certification, and why verified room-level data is now surfacing in AI travel search. It was one of the more unexpected conversations of the week, and one of the more important ones.

How travelers search for hotels has permanently changed

The shift to AI-assisted hotel discovery is well underway. What is less discussed is how far beyond price and location those searches now go. A traveller planning a trip to Berlin and opening ChatGPT today might ask not just about budget and neighbourhood, but about cleanliness, sustainability, or whether a property has a history of bedbug complaints. Until recently, AI systems had no reliable way to answer those questions with anything more than aggregated reviews and marketing copy.

Valpas has built the infrastructure that changes that. Real-time, room-level certification data, verified rather than self-reported, is now being surfaced in AI travel search, with ChatGPT as the first integration launched this week at ITB. A hotel that is Valpas-certified is a hotel that ChatGPT can actually prove is clean. That is a different proposition from one that merely claims to be.

Bedbugs are a distribution problem

Martim reframed bedbugs in a way that shifts the entire conversation. They do not spread through poor housekeeping. They spread like a virus, carried by travellers from property to property and home to home. Fifty percent of European households have already experienced an infestation at least once. The reactive approach, pesticide treatment after an infestation is discovered, closes a floor for weeks or months and still does not prevent the next guest from carrying the problem somewhere else.

Valpas takes a different approach entirely. Proprietary safe sleep technology is installed under or next to guest beds, operating continuously. When a traveller arrives carrying bedbugs, the technology removes them within the first two hours of the stay, preventing infestation before it begins. The result is verifiable, room-level proof of safety that updates in real time and flows to every booking surface: OTAs, RFP responses, and now AI systems.

A fourth pillar of sustainability

The sustainability angle in this conversation was one that most people in the room at ITB had not considered. Hotels have made significant progress on the three standard pillars: water, waste and energy. Indoor pesticide use has remained largely invisible, both to properties and to the certifications evaluating them.

The picture Martim painted is striking. Indoor pesticide use has increased sharply over the past 20 years precisely because bedbugs have spread. Pesticides are the standard reactive treatment, but bedbugs are now resistant to all legally permitted pesticides in the EU, meaning exposure times are increasing even as efficacy falls. And 95 percent of the pesticides applied indoors do not stay indoors. They disperse into the air, reach outdoor ecosystems, and are a primary driver of pollinator decline.

The EU Ecolabel has recognised this gap and is updating its criteria accordingly, in part through direct collaboration with Valpas. Travalyst and GSTC have aligned around the standard. The category is forming.

Corporate travel is the next frontier

Guest preference is already shifting. Corporate procurement is about to formalise it. A bedbug incident on a business trip is not a hospitality complaint. It is an HR event, with duty-of-care implications for the travel manager who approved the hotel. Formal RFP criteria around certified bedbug safety have not fully hardened yet across corporate travel programmes. That is the window. Hotels that certify now will be the default choice when those criteria do harden.

Valpas currently operates across more than 60 destinations and 50,000 beds, with certified properties including Marriott and Aman. The question for every hotelier, as Martim put it, is whether they are setting the category or responding to it.