Most of the conversations that brought the standard into those hotels started with someone the hotel already trusted.
That's how the Valpas Ambassador network works. It covers twelve countries today, run by people who already work inside the guest room: premium bedding suppliers, hoteliers, and increasingly hospitality advisors and operators.
The industry has been here before. Roughly once a decade, a guest concern moves from afterthought to standard. Smoking in the 1990s, Wi-Fi in the 2000s, sustainability in the 2010s.
In 2026, Phocuswright surveyed 1,082 travellers in the US, UK and France and found the next one: bed bug safety is now the #1 booking concern in all three markets, and the most valued guest room attribute in the UK and France. Each time, the new standard reached hotels the same way, through people the industry already trusted.
An Ambassador introduces hotels in their own network to Valpas. They don't sell. They make warm introductions to properties where they think the standard would matter, and the Valpas team takes it from there.
Mario joined as one of the first Ambassadors in November 2022. Ecus Sleeps supplies premium bedding to hotels across Spain, so his team is in and out of guest rooms by the nature of the work.
For me, being a good ambassador also means being selective. You cannot introduce every product to every hotel. You need to protect your relationships by making introductions that are genuinely useful. The best ambassadors are generous with their network, but also responsible with it.
Ask Mario what makes a good introduction and he names three things: tailoring, timing, and simplicity. The more specific the connection, the stronger it lands.
It should never feel like a cold sales pitch. It should feel like: I know both sides, I understand the challenge, and I believe there is a meaningful reason for you to meet."
Evripidis, CEO and co-founder of Santo Apolimantiki, joined in February 2024. His company works with hotels across Greece, which has given him a close view of how the bed bug question actually comes up inside an operating hotel.
"I always have some kind of connection to the hotels. When we introduce hotels, we usually already know them. That makes the introduction so much easier."
For him, two things make an introduction land. Expertise, because an Ambassador needs to understand how bed bugs move between properties and what that means for the asset over time. And connection, because the introduction works when the Ambassador is already part of the same professional circle as the hotel.
The bed bug-safe standard now lives in the booking layer. It's machine-readable, AI travel assistants surface it, and corporate procurement teams have started asking for it.
None of that replaces the relationship layer. Hotels move when someone they trust tells them to look. The Ambassador network is how that conversation happens, market by market, from Spain to Japan.
If the decade pattern holds, bed bug safety will follow the same route Wi-Fi and sustainability did: from a back-office concern to a visible, priced standard. The hotels that move first will be the ones whose trusted advisors put it in front of them.
For Mario in Spain and Evripidis in Greece, that means a small number of high-quality introductions per quarter, into networks they already know. For Ambassadors in the other ten countries, the work looks the same.
