levelsio says Hotelist is now his biggest site at 700k visitors

levelsio says Hotelist has passed 700,000 visitors per month, making it his most popular site. The same day, he added user profiles, invite-only for now, and handed the first invites to @marckohlbrugge, @jelmerdeboer and @theannalux, who each get three invites of their own to pass along.

@levelsio

@levelsio

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you're probably far away from a fake reviewer and you trust your friends' reviews

What the profiles do is simple. Users can review and rate hotels, upvote or downvote other users' reviews, and earn karma from all of it. The seed of the idea came from Marc, levelsio says, built on the theory that you trust your friends and their friends more than you trust a stranger on Google Maps.

The anti-fake-review angle

The reason to bolt a social graph onto a hotel directory is not engagement for its own sake. levelsio frames invites as a filter. Fake reviews travel through accounts nobody knows, so a network grown by invitation keeps the reviewer and the reader within a couple of hops of each other.

That is the argument, not a result. Nobody has posted numbers on how many profiles have been claimed or whether the review quality holds up once the invite tree gets a few layers deep. Invite-only also caps growth by design, which is a real cost for a site already doing serious traffic.

It also talks to agents

In a follow-up, levelsio says Hotelist works as an MCP connector, so you can find, book and review hotels through your AI agent. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the standard that lets an agent call an outside service directly rather than clicking through a website.

@levelsio

@levelsio

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it works as an MCP connector so you can find, book and review hotels via your favorite AI agent

That is the part worth noting for anyone running a consumer site. Shipping an agent interface alongside the web one is the cheapest available version of the sell-to-agents bet founders keep arguing about, and it does not require giving up the human-facing product. The same inventory serves both. levelsio has not said whether any bookings have come through the connector yet.

The two moves sit oddly next to each other, which is the interesting bit. One leans hard on human trust, friends vouching for friends, karma as a reputation score. The other hands the whole flow to a machine that has no friends and no karma. A hotel site is a decent place to test whether those two audiences can share a database, because the thing being sold is the same either way.

Neither is proven. What is on the record is 700,000 visitors a month, levelsio's own number, and a product that shipped profiles and an agent endpoint on the same day.