The Playa and Gali Hartuv Launch the VIP Operations Survey 2026 – Participants See the Findings Before Anyone Else

I have spent more than fifteen years in VIP. Ask me almost anything about this work, and I will have an opinion, usually a strong one. 

Then ask me this: how does an average VIP team actually operate? I cannot tell you. Neither, I suspect, can anyone else – and it is not for lack of experience. It is that we have never had a benchmark to check ourselves against.

And it is not an accident that we don’t. Every VIP team I have ever met solved this alone. Alone on tooling. Alone on how to structure the team, where to set qualification thresholds, how to decide who gets the call today and who waits. Everyone built their own answer, inside their own company, and almost nobody compared notes. Which is strange, given the stakes – miss a signal and a player worth defending is gone before anyone noticed the pattern; push too hard in the wrong moment, and you have done damage that no retention budget repairs.

So there is no shared picture. No average portfolio size. No sense of how much of the week disappears into pulling reports before anyone speaks to a player. No best practice, or none that anyone can point to and say who decided it.

That’s why, together with The Playa, I have launched the VIP Operations Survey 2026 – anonymous, about ten minutes, open to anyone working in VIP. Here’s why you need to take part in it. 

Your Answers Change What We Build

The survey asks the unglamorous things. How much of your week goes to defining priorities. How long you spend pulling data before a single conversation. How much visibility you really have across your portfolio at any moment. How often you make a decision knowing the information in front of you is stale or incomplete.

Then it asks the question this industry has been circling for two years now: what would you actually want an AI tool to do for you,  and what worries you about letting it into your workflow?

And if I am going to ask you for ten minutes of honesty about your challenges, I owe you two things back.

The first is a new VIP Masterclass – and I am building it on what comes back from this survey. If the answers tell me the worst part of the week is something I had not prioritised, the curriculum changes. 

The second is a solution called VIP Intelligence, which I am co-developing with The Playa. Nothing like it has existed in VIP programmes before: it reads behaviour instead of deposits, so a player’s value is visible on day one rather than week six. But we need your answers to define the priorities right and be sure we solve the most crucial pain points.

What Else You Get

The survey is anonymous and takes about ten minutes. It is open to anyone in VIP – in-house, outsourced, or consulting.

Participants see the findings before publication, and get an invite to a closed session where we go through what the data actually says. There is a discount on the masterclass in October, and one participant will be drawn to attend free.

But the honest reason to fill it in is the first one. This becomes a benchmark only if enough of us answer it.