case study

Geode

Geode is a hospitality-intelligence dashboard. It turns scattered public signals (guest reviews, ratings, and pricing) into one view of how a hotel is really doing. I built it on a simple realization: a star rating is weighted toward past performance, not current conditions. Management changes can shift a hotel in a matter of months — so the trajectory of its reviews is often the more revealing signal.

I designed and built it end to end — the ingestion pipeline, the scoring model, and the interface. The live demo runs over two sample markets, Austin and New York.

A Geode venue-detail view: a hotel scored at a Geode Index of 93, with tiles for rating, rate, recent-vs-lifetime, sentiment, and press

THE IDEA

Most tools hand you a star rating. Geode gives you review trajectory and keyword themes, so hotel owners and travel advisors can make an informed call without scouring multiple review sites.

WHAT'S IN IT

A blended Geode rating. One rating, volume-weighted across Google, Tripadvisor, and Booking, with each platform counted once inside a rolling four-year window — so no single source skews the picture.
Trajectory and trends. Monthly rating trend, recent versus lifetime, and keyword themes rising or falling. Direction over snapshots.
Keyword intelligence. Review text sorted into dimensions (service, food and beverage, condition, value) with a type-aware lexicon, so a hotel's restaurant is judged on food, menu, and wait — not its rooms.

A Geode dataset view: Austin's luxury hotels ranked by score, rating, trend, review volume, and rate per night

HOW IT WORKS

Scrape. Config-driven ingestion pulls reviews (Apify) and ratings and rates (DataForSEO) per market. One shared import engine and a dataset registry mean adding a market is a config entry, not a code fork.
Store. Postgres and PostGIS, with a bundled-JSON read path the front end can fall back to.
Analyze. De-duplicate so each platform counts once, window to four years, derive the blended rating and a composite score, run the monthly trajectory math, and detect which keyword themes are moving.
Serve. An installable React and Vite PWA over an Express API, with charts in Recharts and a Mapbox map of the comp set.

Stack: React + Vite (PWA), Recharts, Mapbox GL, Node/Express, Postgres + PostGIS, deployed on a VPS.

OUTCOME

Geode is live as an alpha demo — a product-and-engineering portfolio project that brings together the two halves of my work: a decade inside luxury travel, and building data products in code.

Open the live demo