Travel Tech Podcast

Epizode

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  Code Is Twenty Percent of the Thing 09.10.2026 12min

  AI made writing code nearly free, which only matters if code was ever most of the job.In this compilation episode, host Alex Brooker pulls together clips from seven past guests across travel software, airspace infrastructure, airline operations, corporate travel, content, and airline ancillaries who each arrived at the same idea independently. Alex Ragin of Zoftify puts a number on it: code is about 20% of a software product, and the other 80% is domain knowledge, process, and judgment. The episode follows that 80% through edge cases, daily operational disruption, fare construction expertise, and the question of what a product team's job becomes when execution costs almost nothing.What You'll LearnThe 20/80 split: Code is roughly 20% of a complex travel system, and the remaining 80% is knowledge of how the business actually works.Vibe coding limits: A simple invoicing app can be vibe coded, but a CRM, ERP, or GDS cannot, because the hard part is specifying behavior rather than writing it.Edge case cost: One modest custom fields feature at Zoftify took about five days of internal and client discussion before it was ready to build.Failure at the seams: Complex systems break at their interfaces and edge cases, not on the happy paths that teams test and load test.No standard day: In airline operations, disruption from weather, aircraft swaps, or system faults is the normal state rather than the exception.Expertise outside the code: International fare specialists routinely beat GDS pricing engines by thousands of dollars by knowing where to break a fare.Where value moves: As development costs approach zero, advantage shifts to network effects, knowledge of customer pain, and position in the customer journey.The new job: When execution is cheap, deciding what to build and why becomes the core work for every team, not just well funded ones.Time-Stamped Highlights (0:00) One number about what software actually is(1:08) "Why can't we just vibe code this?"(1:37) Five days of edge cases for one custom fields feature(3:45) Code is 20%, knowledge is 80%(4:06) Complex systems fail at the seams, not the center(5:30) A pilot on why there is no standard day(6:24) The fare specialists the GDS could never replace(7:33) Value shifts from code to network and knowledge(8:16) Shipping a travel product with zero coding background(9:19) If building is nearly free, what is the job?(10:27) From paper scribbles to AI built slide decks(11:33) Why choosing what to build is now everyone's problemGuest biosAlex Ragin runs Zoftify, a software agency built for the travel industry, and Tourseta, a platform for tour operators. He hears the "can't we just vibe code this?" question from prospective clients every week. Full conversation: Episode 20. LinkedIn · zoftify.com · tourseta.comAmit Ganjoo is Founder and CEO of ANRA Technologies, a drone operations and UAS traffic management platform. His career runs from experimental aircraft design to airspace infrastructure, with more than 20 years across aviation, telecom, and wireless. Full conversation: Episode 6. anratechnologies.com · LinkedInLeo Kotil flew commercial jets before founding Overwatch AI, which builds AI tools that give airline crews fast access to operational information. Full conversation: Episode 3. LinkedIn · overwatch-ai.comJim Hetzel began his career in a corporate travel agency, working alongside the international pricing specialists who could outprice the GDS by hand. He now works on retailing strategy at TWAI. Full conversation: Episode 16. LinkedIn · twai.comÍñigo Valenzuela is the founder of Smartvel, which provides destination content for travel brands. Full conversation: Episode 24. LinkedIn · smartvel.comChristopher Olivares is the founder of Elyo. He had never written a line of code before February 2025, when he began building his travel product himself with ChatGPT. Full conversation: Episode 17. LinkedIn · elyo.ioIñaki Uriz is Co-founder and CEO of Caravelo, the company behind many of the airline subscription products launched in recent years. Full conversation: Episode 32. LinkedIn · caravelo.comAbout the Podcast: The Travel Tech Podcast features long-form conversations with leaders across travel and technology. The show explores how software, data, operations, and distribution come together in real businesses, with an emphasis on tradeoffs, incentives, and lessons that transfer beyond any single company or role.Host bio: Alex Brooker is an engineer, technology leader, and founder of Airside Labs, which applies aviation-grade testing and compliance rigor to enterprise AI systems. Before Airside Labs, he built and scaled complex software in aviation and other safety-critical domains. He also invests in early-stage technology ventures. LinkedIn
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  The Pricing Fight Inside Every Airline 01.10.2026 1h

  Two euros can decide who wins a metasearch sale. Inside most airlines, moving them is still revenue management's call, and it is rarely fast.Valentino Portnoy is the CEO and founder of TravelDax, a B2B platform that collects flight pricing data from metasearch engines and turns it into competitive insights for airlines and OTAs. He and Alex discuss why airlines now track OTAs more closely than rival carriers, how internal politics slow down pricing decisions, and why classic machine learning still beats gen AI on pricing. They also cover agentic automation for legacy systems and what AI chat booking means for distribution.What You'll LearnAI and metasearch: Metasearch sites dominate AI chat answers to flight questions, and are doing better there than in traditional search.OTA monitoring: Roughly 75 to 80% of airline usage on TravelDax goes to tracking OTAs rather than competing airlines, including whether their branded fares are displayed as intended.Metasearch visibility: An airline fare listed below six or seven OTA offers is effectively invisible to the traveler.Losing the customer: Airlines that tolerate OTA undercutting still lose control of loyalty and the customer experience.Gen AI vs machine learning: In TravelDax's testing, classic machine learning still outperforms gen AI on price prediction and recommendations.The last mile: AI agents operating on local machines could automate the final price change that legacy airline systems block today.Internal friction: Conflicting goals between revenue management and commercial teams are a bigger barrier to pricing agility than technology.Speed over accuracy: In competitive pricing, acting faster than competitors matters more than being right every time.Connector risk: AI labs can see which travel connectors succeed, and the best performers risk being absorbed into the platform.Time-Stamped Highlights(0:00) Two Euros Can Make a Huge Difference(2:03) A University Project That Predicted Fare Drops(7:04) Why Latin America Never Got Its Own Metasearch Leader(10:16) From Manual Checks to Automated Competitor Tracking(14:04) Invisible Behind Seven OTAs(16:50) Did AI Kill Metasearch? The Data Says No(20:09) Why Gen AI Loses to Machine Learning on Pricing(24:47) The Legacy Systems Blocking the Last 30%(26:31) Would You Let an Agent Change Your Fares?(33:42) Revenue Management vs the Commercial Team(40:29) Why Speed Beats Being Right(42:35) Meta Muse, Gemini, and Booking Inside the Chat(50:39) Testing Claude on a Real Lisbon Trip(53:53) The App Store Risk for Travel ConnectorsGuest bio Valentino Portnoy is the CEO and founder of TravelDax, an automation platform that collects, analyzes, and delivers competitive pricing insights to airlines and OTAs, sourced primarily from metasearch engines. A software engineer by training, he built one of the first metasearch engines in Latin America and has worked at an OTA and as a consultant to airlines and OTAs. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/valentino-portnoy/ | Company: https://traveldax.com/About the Podcast The Travel Tech Podcast features long-form conversations with leaders across travel and technology, exploring how software, data, operations, and distribution come together in real businesses. The show emphasizes tradeoffs, incentives, and lessons that transfer beyond any single company or role.Host bio Alex Brooker is an engineer, technology leader, and the founder of Airside Labs, which applies aviation-grade testing and compliance rigor to enterprise AI systems. He previously built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety-critical domains, and he invests in early-stage technology ventures. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-brooker-2280002/🔎Connect your agent
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  Trust as Infrastructure: Who Your AI Travel Agent Actually Works For 24.09.2026 14min

  Everyone is racing to build the AI agent that books your trip, and nobody is building the thing that makes it safe to use one.In this themed episode, host Alex Brooker brings together six guests from different corners of travel and aviation who independently arrived at the same conclusion: agentic travel has a trust problem, not a model problem. Eric Leopold, Christopher Olivares, Mike Putman, Nancy Li Smith, Fred Bean, and Jim Hetzel each address who an AI agent really works for, how a traveler would know, and who makes it right when something goes wrong.What You'll LearnThe dual agent problem: Travel merged the buyer's agent and the seller's agent into one intermediary, a setup advertising would never allow.Who pays decides who's served: An assistant paid for by the traveler can work for the traveler, while one funded by suppliers works for them.Free platforms aren't free: OTA commissions show up in hotel pricing, so travelers pay for "free" booking indirectly.Brands at risk: Personal agents that know a traveler well may route around big OTA brands entirely if those brands don't offer the best outcome.The bed bank gap: Today's agents can't reach most bed banks directly because neither side has the infrastructure for it.Social trust over model quality: Recommendations tied to people with a reputation on the line outperform model outputs users feel they need to verify.Fraud at human speed today: Fake hotel sites with full image libraries already outrank real hotels on their own names and take real money.The missing institution: Agent to agent commerce needs identity, authority, enforcement, settlement, and dispute resolution, the functions IATA provides for today's industry.Time-Stamped Highlights(0:00) Everyone's Building the Agent, Nobody's Building the Trust(0:45) One Advisor, Two Masters: Eric Leopold on Travel's Merged Intermediary(1:45) Why a $20 Subscription Changes Who the Assistant Serves(2:21) From Airline Ticket Office to Everything Seller(3:22) No Free Lunch: Christopher Olivares on OTA Economics(4:45) Bootstrapped by Design: Why Elio Doesn't Monetize the Channel(5:24) Getting Branded Out: Mike Putman's Case for the Market(7:02) Why Agents Can't Reach the Bed Banks Yet(8:08) "Is It Even Legit?": Nancy Li Smith on Unsourced AI Answers(9:10) The Fraud Gap: Fred Bean on Moving Beyond Price Centric Booking(10:06) Look to Book at Machine Speed: Jim Hetzel on Billions of Bots(11:54) Identity, Authority, Enforcement, Settlement: The IATA Nobody Has Built(13:40) Six Guests, One Missing PieceGuest BiosEric Leopold spent 15 years at IATA, where he was behind the barcode on today's boarding passes, and has more than two decades in the travel industry. He advocates for AI assistants that act as true buyer's agents. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ericleopoldChristopher Olivares is the solo founder of Elyo, a conversational flight search tool based in Paris. He came to travel from the OECD with a background in economics and data. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-olivares-40b8b283/ | Company: https://elyo.io/Mike Putman launched one of the first online travel agency stacks in 1996 and now runs Custom Travel Solutions, which gives travel agents and AI agents access to bed bank inventory. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeputman/ | Company: https://customtravelsolutions.comNancy Li Smith built the AI platform behind Meta's Ray-Ban glasses before founding Boop, which pairs AI with social trust for travel recommendations. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nancyliseattle/ | Company: https://www.boopwithme.com/Fred Bean runs HotelPORT and works on traveler fraud protection and attribute based hotel selling. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fredbean/ | Company: hotelport.com | Foundation: https://bigfoundation.net/Jim Hetzel has spent his career in airline distribution, much of it in back office IT infrastructure. He focuses on how look to book economics and trust hold up when bots replace humans at scale. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jhetzel/ | Company: https://twai.comAbout the PodcastThe Travel Tech Podcast features long form conversations with leaders across travel and technology, exploring how software, data, operations and distribution come together in real businesses, with an emphasis on tradeoffs, incentives and lessons that transfer beyond any single company or role.Host BioAlex Brooker is the founder of Airside Labs, an AI business that applies aviation grade testing and compliance rigour to enterprise AI systems, helping organisations build and test AI agents in regulated environments. Before founding Airside Labs, he built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety critical domains. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-brooker-2280002/🔎Connect your agent
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  ChatGPT Said the Visa Would Be Accepted. It Wasn't. 15.09.2026 46min

  A guy who used to hand carry passports to airport cargo terminals just built the database he couldn't afford in 2018 for a fraction of the cost, and every application still passes through a human before it goes anywhere.Rob Lee is CEO and co-founder of Swift Passport and Visa Services, a company he started in 2008 helping private aviation clients navigate passport and visa logistics. In this conversation, Rob traces the industry from same day passport courier runs through the shift to eVisas and ETAs, and explains why his team uses AI heavily to build internal tooling while keeping customer data out of public AI tools and a human check on every application.What You'll LearnSame day submission: Swift's early edge came from same day processing of small batches while larger competitors sat on high volume mail for a day or two.Business visa niche: The one day speed advantage mattered most to business travelers with short notice trips, which became Swift's core market.eVisa disruption: The shift from paper visas to electronic visas and ETAs starting around 2018 to 2019 initially looked like it would eliminate the need for a service like Swift's.Payment friction: Countries like India built extensive fraud checks into eVisa payment systems, creating a new kind of complexity that replaced the old paper bottleneck.AI reliability gap: Rob says general AI models still give inconsistent, sometimes incorrect answers about visa requirements because the underlying web content is outdated or contradictory.Internal AI use: Swift uses AI extensively to scrape government and consulate websites and build a requirements database, with human review as a mandatory quality control step.Cost collapse: A database project Rob priced at roughly $780,000 in 2018 became achievable at a small fraction of that cost using current AI assisted development.Diplomacy over technology: Visa processing delays are often a diplomatic reciprocity mechanism between countries rather than a technical limitation.Time-Stamped Highlights (0:00) The Johannesburg immigration story that started it all(3:39) Getting into aviation clients and starting during the 2008 recession(5:24) Hand carrying passports to the cargo terminal(7:36) Cracking the code on same day submission(10:21) Chasing down a Chinese visa in 48 hours(10:37) Brazil's three to four week visa era(11:36) The industry wide shift to eVisas and ETAs(13:46) India's payment fraud checks and 15 failed attempts(18:56) Why AI filled visa forms still get people turned away(25:08) Swift's own policy on customer data and AI(29:27) Building the database Rob couldn't afford in 2018(33:15) How the new platform prefills forms and letters of intent(35:13) Best travel hacks: park fees, natural resource taxes, and 60 day prep windows(38:54) Why visa delays are a diplomatic bargaining chip, not a technical problemGuest bio Rob Lee is CEO and co-founder of Swift Passport and Visa Services, which he started in 2008 to help travelers navigate expedited passport and visa processing. The company has grown over roughly 18 years into a business serving corporate travelers, airlines, and individual applicants across dozens of countries. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eelbor/ | Company: https://www.swiftpassportservices.com/About the Podcast The Travel Tech Podcast features long form conversations with leaders across travel and technology, exploring how software, data, operations and distribution come together in real businesses, with an emphasis on tradeoffs, incentives and lessons that transfer beyond any single company or role.Host bio Alex Brooker is the founder of Airside Labs, an AI business that applies aviation grade testing and compliance rigour to enterprise AI systems, helping organisations build and test AI agents in regulated environments. Before founding Airside Labs, he built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety critical domains.🔎Connect your agent
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  The Deal AI Can Never Find 08.09.2026 51min

  Airlines have spent decades making you earn loyalty through repetition. Iñaki Uriz builds the opposite: you pay first, and the relationship starts before you have flown a single mile.Iñaki Uriz is co-founder and CEO of Caravelo, the platform behind flight subscription products at airlines including Wizz Air and JetSmart. He and Alex Brooker cover how subscribers behave once they have committed, the COVID moment that made Caravelo bet the company on subscriptions, why corporate travel is next, and why Uriz expects AI fare comparison to push airlines towards private deals that sit outside anything an agent can search.What You'll LearnSubscriptions vs loyalty: Loyalty programmes make customers prove commitment before rewarding them. Subscriptions take the financial commitment up front and reward it immediately, and can front load status for the higher tiers.Where the incremental revenue comes from: Unused credits (subscribers use 70 to 80% of packaged flights), new demand created by the subscription itself, and market share, because a subscriber stops searching competitors.The number that matters: For every $100 of subscription revenue, $30 to $50 is money the airline would not otherwise have captured, consistently across customers.Churn benchmarks: Monthly churn runs 3 to 4%, so roughly two thirds of subscribers renew for a second year at no acquisition cost.The second wallet effect: Because the subscription was paid at the start of the cycle, a $50 upsell at booking time feels like $50 rather than $200, which lifts ancillary attachment on planned trips.Two products for two problems: The flight subscription suits an airline chasing market share on a route or region. The last minute pass sells unlimited access to distressed inventory inside a short booking window, which helps flatten a seasonal demand curve.First mover advantage is structural: A subscriber leaves the market. The airline that signs them first keeps them until they actively unsubscribe.The corporate long tail: Only a Bank of America can negotiate a bespoke deal with Delta. Prepackaged subscription tiers give a 300 person firm the same trade: better terms in exchange for exclusivity.AI raises the stakes on price transparency: As agents get better at comparing every public fare against travel policy, a subscriber has already opted out of the comparison, and a private subscription deal is not something an agent can find.Execution is no longer scarce: Uriz on running a company through three years of AI: the work has shifted from producing slides, code and spreadsheets to deciding what to produce and why.Time-Stamped Highlights(0:00) The Mark Cuban lifetime flight pass cold open(1:17) Subscriptions explained like you're five(2:53) How this is different from a loyalty programme(5:49) The economics of 24 flights a year, breakage, and $30 to $50 incremental per $100(9:17) Does the incremental revenue effect plateau, and retailing on top of a relationship(13:48) Founding story: pre-COVID product testing and the pivot that saved the company(16:56) Why subscription launches make headlines and then quietly disappear(19:39) Two products: the flight subscription vs the last minute distressed inventory pass(21:50) Regional subscription tiers: the Wizz Air network by country example(27:19) Churn and renewal benchmarks against the broader subscription economy(31:05) The second wallet effect and ancillary upsell behaviour(32:00) Corporate travel as the next growth vector, and democratising the Bank of America deal(36:44) AI's current and future impact on airline distribution(39:32) A relationship based moat that AI comparison can't reach(43:00) Execution is no longer the scarce thing: sketches, Claude Design and deciding what to build(47:23) Closing reflections: the frustration and pull of working in aviationWhere to find CaraveloIñaki and the Caravelo team will be at Arabian Travel Market, Dubai (14 to 17 September), T2RLEngage, London (21 to 23 September), World Aviation Festival, Lisbon (13 to 15 October), where they will have a booth, and WTM London (3 to 5 November). Alex will be in the startup village at the World Aviation Festival. Guest bioIñaki Uriz is co-founder and CEO of Caravelo, the platform behind airline subscription products, including flight subscriptions and last minute distressed inventory passes, for airlines such as Wizz Air and JetSmart. He led the company from its pre-pandemic origins as a broader retailing experiment through its narrowing into subscriptions during COVID.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ium/Company: https://www.caravelo.com/About the PodcastThe Travel Tech Podcast features long form conversations with leaders across travel and technology, exploring how software, data, operations and distribution come together in real businesses, with an emphasis on tradeoffs, incentives and lessons that transfer beyond any single company or role.Host bioAlex Brooker is the founder of Airside Labs, an AI business that applies aviation grade testing and compliance rigour to enterprise AI systems, helping organisations build and test AI agents in regulated environments. Before founding Airside Labs, he built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety critical domains.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-brooker-2280002/Your AI can already build the slide. Does it know aviation?Iñaki's point applies to all of us: the deck now takes ten seconds, so the value is in what you ask for and whether you can trust what comes back. Airside Labs is now a connector for Claude and ChatGPT, listed under Airside Labs in both directories. It puts 6,500 aviation AI use cases by sector and role behind your AI, plus an EASA AI level and hazard screen for any of them. Free tier, no card needed.🔎Connect your agent
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  Above China, Your Starlink Doesn't Exist 01.09.2026 57min

  The most reliable AI on your next flight might be the one that assumes it has no internet connection at all.Ajith Balakumar is the CEO and founder of Forthcode, an aviation technology company that grew out of a point-of-sale system built for a 2,500-outlet coffee chain in India. The conversation covers how an offline-first architecture built for retail became the foundation for in-flight commerce, catering, loyalty, and an AI ground-staff agent called Davix, and how Ajith thinks about AI maturity, regulation, and building software at founder speed.What You'll LearnOffline-first architecture: In-flight software can't assume connectivity, because satellite access can be blocked by entire governments regardless of available bandwidth.AI trust: Ground staff trust an AI's answer more when it cites the exact SOP page and paragraph behind it, not just when it gives a confident response.AI maturity: Organizations move through three stages: co-pilots where the human decides everything, agents where the human approves a subset of decisions, and operational intelligence where multi-agent systems feed executive decision-making.Regulatory readiness: GDPR already applies to any European passenger's data, and standardized AI compliance layers, similar to an API gateway, are emerging from major cloud providers.Data sovereignty: Forthcode avoids routing airline data through frontier LLMs, preferring locally hosted models so information never leaves the airline's environment.Adoption pattern: Most airlines are still running isolated AI pilots rather than operational AI, because executives want quantifiable ROI before scaling.Builder speed: AI-assisted prototyping now lets a founder build and test a fully functional application in about an hour, compared with days of spec-writing and revision cycles.Prompting as a diagnostic: How someone prompts a general AI tool reveals their own problem-solving process, which is part of why teams with AI tools still underuse them.Time-Stamped Highlights(0:00) The accidental entry into aviation, through a coffee chain's point-of-sale system(4:03) Why offline-first became the only viable architecture for in-flight transactions(4:45) The geopolitics of connectivity: Starlink, airspace, and government restrictions(7:56) The reconciliation problem: every flight is a store with no fixed manager(11:27) Where Forthcode sits in the airline tech stack: retail, catering, and Lounge in the Sky(13:44) Introducing Davix, the AI roving agent for ground staff(15:54) Why evidence and citations solve AI's trust problem with frontline staff(19:41) The stress of ground staff work and how AI changes accountability(25:53) The AI maturity model: co-pilots, agents, and operational intelligence(29:27) India versus Europe: GDPR, EASA, and the coming wave of AI guardrail tooling(33:37) Why Forthcode avoids frontier LLMs and is building fully offline in-flight AI(36:32) The current state of AI adoption across airlines: pilots versus operational AI(42:38) Building a WhatsApp-driven to-do list app in one hour as a founder(55:05) Closing thoughts: the upcoming Forthcode aviation AI report and what's nextClosing thoughts: the upcoming Forthcode aviation AI report and what's nextGuest bioAjith Balakumar is the CEO and founder of Forthcode, an aviation technology company built around an offline-first architecture, covering in-flight retail, catering management, and the loyalty product Lounge in the Sky, along with Davix, an AI agent for airport ground staff. Company: forthcode.com. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ajithbalakumar.About the PodcastThe Travel Tech Podcast features long-form conversations with leaders across travel and technology, exploring how software, data, operations, and distribution come together in real businesses, with an emphasis on tradeoffs, incentives, and lessons that transfer beyond any single company or role.Host bioAlex Brooker is the founder of Airside Labs, an AI business that applies aviation-grade testing and compliance rigor to enterprise AI systems. Before founding Airside Labs, he built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety-critical domains, and he now also invests in early-stage technology ventures.
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  Why Can't I Just Book My Own Trip? Dual Identity, Dreadful Booking Tools and the Real Job of Corporate Travel 26.08.2026 48min

  Why can't you just book your own work trip? You can. You just won't get reimbursed. Corporate travel exists to manage risk, cost and duty of care, and the tools built to enforce that have spent years treating the traveler as a problem to be contained rather than a person who books flights every week in their own life.Caitlin Gomez, Head of Growth at Amgine, joins Alex to unpack the dual identity at the heart of corporate travel: the same person is a consumer on their phone and a business traveler in the program, and almost nothing in the supply chain connects the two. They cover why the booking tools travelers have suffered through were never designed for them, how suppliers should think about attribution when a traveler shows up under a personal account, why Amgine positions itself as middleware that plugs into existing GDS and TMC infrastructure rather than replacing it, and why AI in corporate travel is only as useful as the antiquated systems it has to talk to. The conversation also takes in Amgine's omnichannel booking flow, the industry's blind spot on ground transportation, and what the recent strategic investment from BCD actually signals about the partnership.What You'll LearnTraveler experience vs. program design: Corporate travel isn't optimized for consumer grade experience because its real job is risk mitigation, cost control, and getting people home safely, not replicating a consumer app.Middleware positioning: Amgine deliberately avoids becoming a consumer brand, choosing instead to integrate into existing TMC and GDS infrastructure rather than compete with it.Fit over features: Flashy travel technology often fails in production because buyers select tools the way people furnish an apartment without measuring the room, and the tool doesn't actually fit the program.Attribution is unsolved: Consumer platforms like rideshare apps have no reliable way to tie a traveler's personal account back to their corporate persona, which limits how partners can prove value to a CFO.Ground transport is the visibility gap: Travel programs track travelers well in the air and at check in but lose visibility the moment someone is in a car between the airport and the hotel.AI is bounded by data quality: AI in travel is only as reliable as the legacy GDS and API infrastructure underneath it, and teams that skip fundamentals for AI shortcuts get stuck when systems break.Human judgment still leads: AI acts as a force multiplier for agents and engineers who already understand the domain, not a substitute for the human judgment needed when a trip goes wrong.Partnership over funding: Amgine's BCD investment came after four months of proven results and was framed internally as acceleration on an already fully funded company, not a lifeline.Timestamped Highlights(00:00) Cold open and podcast intro(00:46) Can employees just book their own travel?(02:49) Why corporate travel is layered, not hard(05:12) Where Amgine sits as "middleware" in the travel stack(06:18) Inside the omnichannel workflow: email, chat, Slack, WhatsApp(09:13) Lessons from GBTA and building Innovation Row(11:02) The apartment without measurements analogy(14:22) What suppliers get wrong: attribution and connective tissue(19:12) The ground transport blind spot and duty of care(25:17) Walking through the WhatsApp booking flow(32:43) Why AI is only as good as the data behind it(38:53) Personal vs. business travel risk tolerance(42:09) The BCD investment and what it actually signals(44:40) Amgine's agnostic positioning and where to find the teamGuest bioCaitlin Gomez is Head of Growth at Amgine (amgine.ai), an AI powered middleware platform that automates the manual, time consuming parts of corporate travel booking without replacing existing GDS and TMC infrastructure. Her background spans travel technology partnerships at Lyft and CLEAR, a consumer facing role at Staples, TMC sales at HRG and Travel Leaders, and founding Innovation Row at GBTA. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caitlingomez/About the PodcastThe Travel Tech Podcast features long form conversations with leaders across travel and technology, exploring how software, data, operations, and distribution come together in real businesses, with an emphasis on tradeoffs, incentives, and lessons that transfer beyond any single company or role.Host bioAlex Brooker is the founder of Airside Labs, an AI business that applies aviation grade testing and compliance rigor to enterprise AI systems in regulated environments. Before founding Airside Labs, he built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety critical domains and now invests in early stage technology ventures.
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  89% of Airline Carts Never Convert 18.08.2026 47min

  Airline checkout loses close to 9 out of 10 shoppers before they ever pay, and Kameron Bertine's fix isn't a redesign — it's an identity layer airlines were never built to have.Kameron Bertine is co-founder and CEO of Movmo, a startup building an identity and checkout layer for airlines and hotels modeled on Shopify's ShopPay. The conversation covers the origin of the problem in Kameron's own booking experience, why airline cart abandonment runs as high as 89%, how Movmo integrates with legacy PSS and NDC infrastructure without replacing it, and why Movmo is deliberately holding off on fully agentic booking despite having the technical capability today.What You'll LearnCart abandonment: Airline booking abandonment runs around 89%, higher than e-commerce's roughly 70-79% and close to ferry bookings at the top of the range.Design pattern: Movmo is modeled directly on Shopify ShopPay and payment layers like Stripe Link and Klarna rather than inventing a new checkout behavior from scratch.Merchant of record: Airlines care most about retaining the merchant-of-record relationship, so Movmo is built as an identity and checkout layer that sits on top of existing systems rather than replacing them.Legacy infrastructure: Movmo is designed to work with whatever PSS, GDS, or NDC infrastructure an airline already runs, since rip-and-replace projects in this industry routinely stall for years.Agentic readiness: Movmo could technically ship agentic booking today, but is deliberately sequencing a two-to-three year rollout through express checkout and white-label products first to build traveler trust before letting AI agents transact directly.Sales reality: Enterprise airline sales cycles typically run 12 to 24 months, sometimes up to 36, which reframes a two-month first proposal as unusually fast progress.Industry priorities: Agentic or AI-driven booking reportedly sits under 5% on airline executives' list of priorities, well behind operations and other concerns.Conversion signal: ShopPay profiles reportedly convert roughly 50% better than guest checkout, a gap Movmo is betting will show up similarly in airline booking once identity persists across sessions.Time-Stamped Highlights(00:00) Cold open and episode introduction(02:05) The Ecuador-to-Spain booking that started it all(03:14) The ShopPay moment: the light bulb for Movmo(07:57) 89% cart abandonment and why it happens(11:01) What Movmo's early user research actually found(14:17) Inside the express checkout flow, explained(15:39) Designing the one-click booking experience(17:18) The escalator sales funnel at FTE/APEX Long Beach(21:52) Legacy rails: working with NDC, GDS, and PSS instead of replacing them(23:50) Layla, Gemini, and where agentic booking is really headed(31:18) Merchant of record, loyalty, and airline governance requirements(33:16) The commercial model and transaction-fee approach(36:58) Why Movmo won't launch full agentic booking yet(39:17) Biggest surprises: sales cycle length and a 35 NPS awardGuest bioKameron Bertine is co-founder and CEO of Movmo, an identity and checkout layer for airlines and hotels designed to reduce cart abandonment and enable persistent traveler profiles across booking sessions. He came from a product design background with prior experience in ERP systems, and founded Movmo in June 2024 after his own frustrating international booking experience. Company: movmo.io | LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kameron-bertineAbout the PodcastThe Travel Tech Podcast features long-form conversations with leaders across travel and technology, exploring how software, data, operations, and distribution come together in real businesses, with an emphasis on tradeoffs, incentives, and lessons that transfer beyond any single company or role.Host bioAlex Brooker is the founder of Airside Labs, an AI business that applies aviation-grade testing and compliance rigor to enterprise AI systems, helping organizations build and test AI agents in regulated environments. Before founding Airside Labs, he built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety-critical domains, and he also invests in early-stage technology ventures.
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  The Feedback You Don't Notice You're Getting 12.08.2026 32min

  Alex Brooker hands his own microphone to the two people who know him best and lets them ask the questions he never answers on his own show.Adrian McKenzie and Oli Deakin, Alex Brooker's former colleagues at Snowflake Software, take over hosting duties on the Travel Tech Podcast to interview Alex directly. The conversation moves through leadership philosophy, the book Alex is writing about his career before and during Snowflake Software, and the early-life habits, from door-to-door fossil sales to a career defining dressing down, that shaped how each of them works today.What You'll LearnLeadership: Being kind, not nice, means having the uncomfortable conversation instead of avoiding it.Feedback: The best feedback often doesn't register as feedback until you reflect on the conversation afterward.Trust: Giving honest feedback gets harder, not easier, with people you haven't worked with for long.Writing: Alex's book centers on the moment a founder's problems outgrow what one person can code alone.Strategy: Most technology leaders solve what's directly in front of them instead of planning three to five years ahead.Formation: Early hustle, from door-to-door sales to Christmas Day shifts, builds a lasting baseline for how someone works.Resilience: Harsh, accurate feedback early in a career can become the turning point that accelerates it.Risk: Leaving a large corporation trades procedural safety nets for closeness to every decision.Time-Stamped Highlights  (0:00) Introduction: turning the tables on Alex  (2:18) Lessons from moving out of corporate life  (2:50) Be kind, not nice  (8:17) The challenge of giving honest feedback to people you don't know well  (11:14) Alex's book project and its emotional core  (13:47) Ollie's hypothetical book: technology strategy        (15:50) Formative story: Alex's childhood fossil-selling hustle  (19:29) Ollie's turning point: the feedback that changed his career  (24:01) Adrian's formative story: dinner table debates and connecting people  (25:41) Threads between early formation and post-corporate strengths  (26:11) Being closer to the edge: solopreneurship vs. corporate safety  (29:02) Why corporate stability is more illusion than reality  (30:04) What's next: AI, small business leverage, and future chapters  (31:41) Closing thoughts and thanksGuest bios Adrian McKenzie helped transform and build Snowflake Software alongside Alex Brooker and Oli Deakin before moving into leadership and team performance work, built around the principle of being kind rather than nice. Oli Deakin was also part of the leadership team as CTO at Snowflake Software (in its second life) and now advises technology leaders on building longer term technology strategy, helping heads of tech and CTOs connect day to day decisions to a three to five year vision.About the Podcast The Travel Tech Podcast features long-form conversations with leaders across travel and technology. The show explores how software, data, operations, and distribution come together in real businesses, with an emphasis on tradeoffs, incentives, and lessons that transfer beyond any single company or role.Host bio Alex Brooker is the founder of Airside Labs, an AI business that applies aviation grade testing and compliance rigor to enterprise AI systems. Before founding Airside Labs, he built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety-critical domains, and he also invests in early-stage technology ventures.
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  An Airline Is Just a Software Stack Nobody Finished Building 03.08.2026 55min

  PLAY Airlines went from zero to $350 million in revenue in three years, did nearly everything right by its former CEO's account, and still went bankrupt — because in aviation, fuel price doesn't care about your execution.Birgir Jónsson is the former CEO of PLAY Airlines, former deputy CEO of WOW air, former CEO of Iceland Express, and previously led a turnaround at Iceland's postal service. In this conversation he breaks down why aviation resists new talent, why airline technology is far less standardized than outsiders assume, and what actually happened when fuel prices upended PLAY's business model after the invasion of Ukraine.What You'll LearnClosed industry: Aviation is a tight-knit, self-referential community that makes it structurally hard for outside talent to break in and stay.Culture split: Airlines run two cultures at once — crew and office — with different metrics, incentives, and worldviews, which makes company-wide alignment unusually hard.Standardization gap: Selling an airline seat looks like a solved e-commerce problem from the outside, but every new airline has to build its distribution and inventory stack from scratch.Fuel exposure: A single input cost — fuel — can erase the value of near-perfect operational execution within weeks.Hub model risk: PLAY's Iceland-as-a-hub strategy between Europe and the US stopped working once new aircraft types and geopolitical shocks shifted capacity onto direct Atlantic routes.Manager gap: Fast-scaling companies routinely promote technical experts into management roles without training them for the different skillset leadership actually requires.AI reality check: AI's near-term value in aviation is internal — helping new hires and cross-functional teams make sense of complex, fragmented data — more than customer-facing booking automation.Founder takeaway: The durable money in aviation tech has historically gone to companies solving infrastructure problems, not to the airlines themselves.Time-Stamped Highlights (00:00) Introduction: an airline CEO joins the show for the first time(01:17) Twenty years in and out of Icelandic aviation(02:36) The "outsider's perspective" and why aviation resists new blood(04:19) Crew vs. office: the divided culture inside every airline(08:15) Building PLAY out of WOW air's DNA, during the pandemic(10:56) Why an airline is really an unfinished software stack(14:07) Negotiating distribution deals in a "very old school" industry(18:16) Legacy vs. new: why a five-year-old airline already has legacy debt(19:50) PLAY's bankruptcy and the fuel price that broke the model(21:30) Private equity, EasyJet, and why aviation takes business personally(29:02) Why the Iceland hub strategy stopped working(35:38) Scaling from zero to $350 million: growing pains and manager training(46:57) Where AI actually helps in aviation today(53:46) Closing advice for founders building in travel techGuest bio Birgir Jónsson is the former CEO of PLAY Airlines, where he led the Icelandic low-cost carrier from launch through rapid growth to roughly $350 million in annual revenue. He previously served as deputy CEO of WOW air, CEO of Iceland Express, and led a turnaround at Iceland's postal service, and has also worked in medical equipment and printing. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/biggijonsson/About the Podcast The Travel Tech Podcast features long-form conversations with leaders across travel and technology, exploring how software, data, operations, and distribution come together in real businesses — with an emphasis on tradeoffs, incentives, and lessons that transfer beyond any single company or role.Host bio Alex Brooker is the founder of Airside Labs, an AI business that applies aviation-grade testing and compliance rigor to enterprise AI systems in regulated environments. Before founding Airside Labs, he built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety-critical domains, and he invests in early-stage technology ventures. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-brooker-2280002/
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  Nobody Would Fund a Human for This 27.07.2026 15min

  Four founders who have never met each other all built the same tool for the same reason: a phone call that no human team could ever be funded to make.This is the first episode in a new series pulling together ideas that surfaced independently across separate conversations with founders and operators. Host Alex Brooker features Mike Putnam (Custom Travel Solutions / reconfirm.ai), Anne Marie Pellerin (airport operations and security), Yagub Rahimov (call center AI infrastructure), and Fred Bean (Hotel Port), each making the case for AI-driven phone calling from a different corner of the travel and aviation industry.What You'll LearnThe reconfirmation gap: Roughly two in every hundred hotel reservations get lost between the booking channel and the property, and the traveler usually finds out at the front desk.Hotel switches and data loss: Distribution tools like travel gateways and hub systems make shopping easier for consumers but create more points where a confirmed booking can quietly disappear.Voice as an audit layer: In airport maintenance operations, AI-driven calls to service engineers can capture and structure information that would otherwise stay fragmented across frontline paper logs, call center software, IT systems, and vendor platforms.The data orchestration bottleneck: Predictive analytics in airport maintenance is blocked less by AI capability and more by the absence of one unified, high-quality data set across all the systems involved.The unit economics case: Processing a single call for transcription and analysis can cost 5 to 10 cents while saving an organization roughly $200 in support time, which is what makes the business case close on its own.Privacy-by-architecture: A gateway approach can anonymize call data before it reaches an LLM, using a single base URL swap rather than a full architectural rebuild.The human off-ramp requirement: Voice AI adoption depends on giving customers a fast, obvious route to a human when they don't want to talk to a machine.Text over voice, long-term: At least one founder in the space expects text and messaging channels to eventually overtake voice as the dominant interface for these interactions.Time-Stamped Highlights (00:00) Introduction: a new series built from ideas raised independently(00:27) Framing the theme: AI phone calling as the through-line(01:10) The traveler's worst moment: a booking that isn't there at check-in(02:00) Mike Putnam on the hotel switch problem and lost reservations(03:22) Inside reconfirm.ai: how the reconfirmation call actually works(04:24) Why the labor cost alone rules out a human doing this job(04:36) Shifting to aviation: Anne Marie Pellerin on equipment failure at 2am(05:16) The failure engine: building a smarter picture of equipment breakdowns(06:09) The real blocker for predictive analytics: no unified data set(08:17) Yagub Rahimov on a call center processing hundreds of thousands of calls daily(10:05) The gateway approach: anonymizing data with a one-line code change(11:38) The cents-versus-hundreds math behind the ROI(13:00) Fred Bean makes the case against voice: the "are you a human" problem(13:16) Why a human off-ramp is non-negotiable for adoption(13:58) The case for text and messaging overtaking voice long-term(14:06) Closing: four founders, one convergent idea, and what's next in the seriesGuest bios Mike Putnam is the founder of Custom Travel Solutions and built reconfirm.ai, a service that uses AI-driven phone calls to verify hotel bookings directly with properties before guests arrive. Anne Marie Pellerin works in airport operations and security, where she has integrated AI into a failure engine that analyzes equipment breakdowns and automates service-engineer notification calls. Yagub Rahimov works with call center infrastructure at scale, building gateway-based AI systems that anonymize customer data before it reaches a language model for processing. Fred Bean is the founder of Hotel Port and offers a counterpoint on voice AI adoption, arguing that human off-ramps and text-based channels will ultimately matter more than voice alone.About the Podcast The Travel Tech Podcast features long-form conversations with leaders across travel and technology, exploring how software, data, operations, and distribution come together in real businesses, with an emphasis on tradeoffs, incentives, and lessons that transfer beyond any single company or role.Host bio Alex Brooker is the founder of Airside Labs, an AI business that applies aviation-grade testing and compliance rigor to enterprise AI systems, helping organizations build and test AI agents in regulated environments. He previously built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety-critical domains, and now invests in early-stage technology ventures while advocating for thoughtful, real-world AI deployment.
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  Fly First, Regulate Later: Why Europe's Rules Are Pushing Drones Abroad 21.07.2026 1h 13min

  Two women who've collectively worked nearly every job aviation has to offer sit down to explain why Europe keeps writing the rulebook before anyone's allowed to fly.Julie Garland, CEO of Avtrain and president of the Joint European Drone Associations, and Sarah Owen, VP for Europe Travel and Transportation at Sutherland and chair of the Aviation Club of the UK, join host Alex Brooker for the podcast's first in-person recording, held in London. The conversation covers unconventional career paths through aviation, the regulatory gap between Europe and the US/China on drones and AI, the persistent gender imbalance across pilots, engineers, and the drone sector, and where AI is (and isn't yet) delivering results in flight operations.What You'll LearnCareer sequencing: Julie moved through roughly ten-year blocks in engineering, flying, and law before founding a drone training company, treating each stage as a deliberate step rather than a single fixed path.Regulatory sequencing: Europe tends to regulate a technology before it has been operated at scale, while the US and China let operators fly first and shape rules from what they learn.Drone scalability barriers: Missing planning, noise, and airspace-access frameworks — not the drones themselves — are why some European drone delivery operators are concentrating expansion in the US, UK, and UAE instead.AI in flight operations: Tools like OptiFlight already use AI to rebalance horizontal and vertical thrust during climb, cutting fuel burn by roughly 5-6% on that phase of flight.Data silos as the real bottleneck: Airports, ground handlers, and airlines often each hold separate slices of operational data, and commercial incentives actively work against sharing it.Safety reporting culture in drones: Unlike commercial aviation's decades-old just culture of non-punitive incident reporting, the drone industry is only now being pushed toward mandated reporting that would let it prove real safety performance.Gender representation stalled: Female representation across pilots, air traffic controllers, and maintenance sits around 5%, with maintenance specifically closer to 2-2.5%, despite lower technical barriers to entry than in the past.Boeing versus Airbus as a cautionary tale: Slower, more conservative adoption of forward-looking technology is framed as a contributing factor in Boeing's more difficult recent stretch relative to Airbus.Time-Stamped Highlights(00:00) Cold open and guest introductions(02:59) Origin stories: how Julie and Sarah each got into aviation(08:22) The last ten days: a week in the life of a drone regulator and an industry chair(10:13) Interviewing Willie Walsh and the Aviation Club dinner(12:55) Ireland's outsized role in global aircraft leasing(16:06) Career challenges: being a female apprentice on the hangar floor in the 1990s(19:10) Mentors who shaped each guest's path(28:51) Imposter syndrome, hesitancy, and why women apply for roles differently than men(36:09) The stalled numbers: gender statistics across pilots, ATC, and maintenance(38:09) Apprenticeship snobbery and the skills pipeline problem(42:52) Tech culture versus aviation culture on diversity enforcement(46:29) The future is already here: multimodal transport, drone deliveries, and the "three Ds"(52:55) AI in practice: OptiFlight, turnaround optimization, and the data-sharing problem(54:40) Regulate-then-operate versus operate-then-regulate: Europe vs the US and China(1:06:00) Building a just culture and mandated reporting in the drone industry(1:09:37) Closing advice for young people considering an aviation careerGuest bioJulie Garland is CEO of Avtrain, Europe's leading drone training and certification body, and president of the Joint European Drone Associations. She began her career as an aircraft maintenance engineer with Aer Lingus, went on to fly as a commercial captain and type-rating instructor, and later qualified as a barrister specializing in aviation law before moving into drone regulation. She also serves on the JARUS industry stakeholder group. Company: avtrain.aero · LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/julie-garland-87925b25Sarah Owen is VP for Europe Travel and Transportation at Sutherland, chairs the Aviation Club of the UK Forum, and sits on the Council of the Royal Aeronautical Society. She has held senior roles at Google, Salesforce, and Cyient, and led commercial strategy at Assaia, a computer vision company focused on aircraft turnaround. Company: sutherlandglobal.com · LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-owen-mraes-38b26b20 · Also referenced: aviationclub.org.ukAbout the PodcastThe Travel Tech Podcast features long-form conversations with leaders across travel and technology, exploring how software, data, operations, and distribution come together in real businesses — with an emphasis on tradeoffs, incentives, and lessons that transfer beyond any single company or role.Host bioAlex Brooker is founder of Airside Labs, an AI business that applies aviation-grade testing and compliance rigor to enterprise AI systems, helping organizations build and test AI agents in regulated environments. Before founding Airside Labs, he built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety-critical domains. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alex-brooker-2280002
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  The Real AI Bottleneck in Travel Content Is Copyright, Not Hallucination 08.07.2026 1h 4min

  Everyone's worried about AI hallucinating travel content. Íñigo Valenzuela says the real problem is that you can't get sued for a hallucination, but you can get fined for a photo.Íñigo Valenzuela is the founder of Smartvel, a travel content and traveler-support data company working with airlines, cruise lines, and OTAs including Iberia, Delta, and MSC. The conversation covers Smartvel's pivot from destination content to COVID travel restriction tracking, the operational complexity of cruise line documentation requirements, and why AI-generated content struggles with image licensing and the long tail.What You'll LearnCOVID pivot: Smartvel repurposed its museum-event web-crawling technology to track changing COVID travel restrictions in near real time for airlines like Iberia and Delta.Cruise complexity: Vaccination and visa requirements on a cruise can depend on the order of ports visited, not just the destinations themselves.Information design: Smartvel's product philosophy is to show travelers only the rules that apply to their specific nationality, age, and itinerary, not the full rule set.AI competition: Valenzuela argues destination content for individual queries is now free and unwinnable, so Smartvel focuses upstream on inspiration and conversion instead.Token economics: Heavily subsidized AI token costs are a temporary condition, and pricing normalization could reshape which AI travel products remain viable.Image licensing: AI-generated destination images can't be used commercially without IP rights, and AI-generated images are unreliable for anywhere that isn't a famous landmark.Market structure: New AI-native travel apps face a distribution problem, since building the product is now nearly free but earning customer awareness against Booking or Expedia isn't.Dynamic pricing: Valenzuela expects personalized pricing based on inferred willingness-to-pay to become more common and views it as a real risk to price transparency for travelers.Time-Stamped Highlights 01:16 - How Íñigo got into travel as a coach-business trainee03:26 - Smartvel's original idea: monetizing destination event content05:18 - The COVID pivot and the call from Iberia07:46 - Scaling from 5 destinations to Delta, United, and Ryanair13:19 - Why cruise vaccination rules depend on port order19:12 - Inside the customer journey: white-labeling for cruise lines21:32 - The travel pets problem and per-airline, per-breed rules26:03 - AI itinerary planners vs. Smartvel's upper-funnel positioning30:30 - Why long tail content only works for big travel brands35:57 - TikTok, Instagram, and the unsolved influencer-to-booking gap40:53 - Why trip planners for end users won't succeed48:20 - Airport apps: which ones are actually indispensable55:50 - The picture licensing problem, explained simply58:07 - The future of bundled travel and personalized pricing riskGuest bio Íñigo Valenzuela is the founder of Smartvel, a travel content and traveler-support platform serving airlines, airports, cruise lines, and OTAs worldwide. He previously held C-level roles in the coach, travel agency, and business travel industries before founding Smartvel 13 years ago. Company: https://www.smartvel.com/ | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/inigovalenzuela/About the Podcast The Travel Tech Podcast features long-form conversations with leaders across travel and technology, exploring how software, data, operations, and distribution come together in real businesses.Host bio Alex Brooker is the founder of Airside Labs, an AI business applying aviation-grade testing and compliance rigor to enterprise AI systems. He previously built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety-critical domains, and now invests in early-stage technology ventures.
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  Travel Inspiration Lives on TikTok. The Booking Still Lives in 47 Browser Tabs. 29.06.2026 51min

  Every billion pieces of travel content on TikTok and Instagram ends in a dead end. Boop is building the call to action that has been missing the whole time.Nancy Li Smith is the CEO and founder of Boop, a social travel platform that lets users generate bookable itineraries from their camera roll and share them with friends who can copy, personalize, and book from them directly. This conversation covers how Boop uses on-device AI to extract trip data from photo metadata, how a 50/50 affiliate commission split rewards itinerary creators, and why Nancy believes trust between real people will consistently outperform AI-generated recommendations built on anonymous internet data.What You'll LearnSocial discovery vs. booking infrastructure: 89% of Gen Z travelers already discover destinations on TikTok and Instagram, but the transaction layer remains a disconnected, multi-tab booking experience that captures intent far too late.On-device AI for privacy: Boop processes photo metadata locally on the user's device, extracting location and trip structure without uploading the camera roll to external servers.The trust graph as a product moat: An AI recommendation grounded in a real friend's verified experience consistently outperforms a general-purpose LLM recommendation because it eliminates the need for the user to evaluate the source.Creator commission mechanics: Boop generates affiliate links automatically across hotel, experience, and activity providers, splitting commissions 50/50 between the platform and the original itinerary creator.Long tail outperforms celebrity: The most-copied trips on Boop are not from large influencers. A Chicago-based flight attendant's eight-day Japan itinerary and an Amsterdam local's guide during the Beyonce tour both outperformed influencer-produced content.The experience economy gap: 80% of experience providers globally are not bookable online. The activity market captures only around 20% of actual experience bookings, and Boop sees that as a primary expansion surface.Frequency signal from data: 50% of trips booked through Boop are four days or fewer, suggesting the platform is activating weekend and micro-trip behavior rather than just annual vacation planning.Network formation without explicit tools: Without building dedicated group-coordination features, Boop already sees users naturally sharing itineraries into WhatsApp groups for pre-trip alignment before anyone books a flight.Time-Stamped Highlights(00:00) Introduction and sponsor(00:32) Nancy's background: Meta Ray-Ban glasses, augmented reality, and the path to travel(02:37) The Venice honeymoon moment that sparked Boop(04:51) Live demo: turning a camera roll into a bookable itinerary(07:55) The BootBesties creator network and the 50/50 commission model(10:44) Balancing influencer reach with the long tail of authentic local trips(13:24) Privacy architecture and on-device AI(17:12) How Boop's AI agent uses the social trust graph versus generic LLMs(21:22) Agentic universal cart: booking hotels, experiences, and niche local providers in one transaction(23:46) The shift from search to social in travel distribution(27:00) Brand strategy: Heineken, sports clubs, and fan-generated itinerary libraries(36:01) Growth metrics: 50% week-over-week growth, doubling users every two weeks(48:49) Founding advice and the community-first approach to building a startupGuest bioNancy Li Smith is the CEO and founder of Boop, a social travel platform based in Seattle. She previously led the AI platform behind the Meta Ray-Ban glasses, held CPO roles in enterprise AI, and ran global perception AI and augmented reality partnerships at Microsoft. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nancyliseattle | Company: boopwithme.comAbout the PodcastThe Travel Tech Podcast features long-form conversations with leaders across travel and technology. The show explores how software, data, operations, and distribution come together in real businesses, with an emphasis on tradeoffs, incentives, and lessons that transfer beyond any single company or role.Host bioAlex Brooker is the founder of Airside Labs, an AI business that applies aviation-grade testing and compliance rigor to enterprise AI systems. Before founding Airside Labs, Alex built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety-critical domains. He also invests in early-stage technology ventures and advocates for disciplined, real-world AI deployment. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alex-brooker-2280002
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  Computer Says No: Why Airlines Won't Take Your Upgrade Money 22.06.2026 56min

  Airlines have been trying to modernize their retailing for over a decade, and most still can't change or refund what they sell.Ann Cederhall is co-founder of LeapShift and one of the architects of the original NDC Direct Connect implementations at Lufthansa, where she helped build the project that became known as the "16 Euros" surcharge. In this episode, she traces the structural reasons why airline retailing has stalled: from the servicing gaps baked into NDC standards through version 24.1, to the 70% of airlines operating without any order management system, to the $650 million to $3 billion in annual revenue leakage from interline proration disputes. The conversation covers what AI can realistically fix and what it cannot.What You'll LearnNDC servicing gap: Airlines could book via NDC from 2012 but could not change, cancel, or refund those bookings until the 24.1 standard in 2024, a 12-year gap that fundamentally limited what airlines could sell through the channel.Version fragmentation: Approximately 70% of airlines currently on NDC are still running version 17.1, leaving them without the servicing capabilities that would make the standard commercially viable.Order management absence: Nearly 70% of airlines surveyed have no orchestration or order management system, meaning they have no centralized control over what they have sold, to whom, and what can be changed.Ancillary inventory failure: Airlines routinely sell ancillary services (seat upgrades, fast track, bags) with no system to verify that those services actually exist at the time and place of purchase.Upgrade opportunity cost: Willingness to pay increases sharply close to departure and at the airport, but most airlines' systems cannot process an upgrade when the booking is held in a travel seller's PNR rather than the airline's own record.AI's real limits in retailing: Agentic AI can filter and interpret shopping results, but it cannot replace shopping engines that have not been modernized in 30 years and still process 20 million fares to surface a handful of relevant options.Revenue management transformation: AI agents can harvest competitor cancellation rates, demand signals, and real-time market data overnight and present a synthesized briefing. That is a significant shift from traditional RM systems built on historical averages.Revenue leakage scale: Global interline revenue leakage runs between $650 million and $3 billion annually, driven by inaccurate proration calculations, uncollected taxes, missing ancillary settlements, and unsettled ticket coupons. Many of these disputes cost more to resolve than the amounts in question.Time-Stamped Highlights(00:00) Introduction and Ann's background in travel(01:19) First airline role at Spantax, then Amex, Amadeus, and SAS(04:03) Arriving at Lufthansa in 2014 and the beginning of NDC(05:15) The "16 Euros" surcharge: what it was and why it caused shock(11:02) Why NDC fell short: no servicing, no ecosystem, GDS recapture(19:03) The order management gap: 70% of airlines with no orchestration(24:32) Ancillary failures: selling services that don't exist(30:33) Upgrade economics and the travel wallet effect(36:00) Why auctions and seat upgrades require caution on premium routes(42:04) What AI can and cannot do in airline retailing(49:35) Revenue management: from sky gods and Excel to overnight AI agents(55:12) Where AI genuinely helps: documentation, process archaeology, long-tail demand(01:01:00) The shopping engine problem: 30 years without modernization(01:06:00) Revenue leakage: $3 billion in interline proration disputes explainedGuest bio Ann Cederhall is co-founder of LeapShift, a consultancy focused on airline retailing, distribution, and commercial strategy. She has held senior roles at Lufthansa, Scandinavian Airlines, Amadeus, and ATPCo, and was involved in the original NDC Direct Connect implementation at Lufthansa in 2015. She is the author of the State of Airline Retailing 2026 report. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anncederhall/ Company: https://leapshift.com/About the Podcast The Travel Tech Podcast features long-form conversations with leaders across travel and technology, exploring how software, data, operations, and distribution come together in real businesses — with an emphasis on tradeoffs, incentives, and lessons that transfer beyond any single company or role.Host bio Alex Brooker is founder of Airside Labs, an AI business that applies aviation-grade testing and compliance rigor to enterprise AI systems. Before founding Airside Labs, he built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety-critical domains. He also invests in early-stage technology ventures. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-brooker-2280002/
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  96% Human Error: Why AI Security Starts with the Human, Not the Model 15.06.2026 1h 3min

  Some travel operators ask you to shout your passport number across a crowded desk and think nothing of it. While intentions are good (checking who you are), this episode is about why that is a serious security failure and what it would take to fix it.Yagub Rahimov is the CEO and founder of Polygraf AI, a company building behavioral security and contextual privacy tools for enterprise environments. In this conversation, he and Alex work through the specific vulnerabilities created when AI agents gain user level access, why human behavior rather than model failure is responsible for the vast majority of data breaches, and what a genuinely privacy respecting travel product would actually look like.What You'll Learn:Agent security: AI agents are a new category of user in the digital security pyramid, with the same system access as humans but no training in deception or social engineering.Deep fake risk: Voice cloning is already sophisticated enough to impersonate individuals convincingly to family members and colleagues, without any technical breach of the underlying systems.Mosaic intelligence: Even anonymized data fed repeatedly to an AI can be re-identified over time through behavioral pattern mapping, a concept Rahimov terms "mosaic intelligence."Behavioral control: Addressing human behavior in real time, before a violation occurs, is more effective than after-the-fact audit or punitive controls, demonstrated by a 72% drop in DLP violations for one enterprise client.Data in AI tools: Organizations that deploy internal LLMs without governing what employees input are creating serious exposure, as one $25M chatbot deployment illustrated on its first day.Travel industry failures: Asking passengers to recite passport numbers and dates of birth aloud in crowded gate areas, or type personal data into in-flight entertainment screens, represents a real and unaddressed privacy risk.Tokenization as a fix: Stripping personal data before it reaches an LLM and reuniting it with processed output via tokenization can deliver the same analytical value with substantially less exposure.QA at scale: AI makes universal quality assurance of customer interactions cheap enough that random sampling is no longer the only option, with one call center client processing 500,000 calls daily at 5 to 10 cents per call.Time-Stamped Highlights:(00:00) Introduction: The airport data disclosure problem(00:00:42) What actually happened with Meta's Instagram AI chatbot(00:06:17) AI agents as a new user type: the security pyramid explained(00:08:57) Deep fakes in practice: voice cloning, elderly parents, and the CEO(00:14:36) North Korean infiltration via data science job interviews(00:20:54) How Polygraf detects synthetic speech in real-time video calls(00:28:42) The meeting note taker with 23 vulnerabilities(00:36:24) How Mr. Paranoid travels: loyalty status, one airline, mid-tier hotels(00:42:58) The oil and gas CEO kidnapping and the email summarizer attack vector(00:49:00) What travel companies get wrong about passenger data collection(00:30:10) Mosaic intelligence and why anonymizing data is not enough(01:07:07) The $25M HR chatbot and the 72% DLP violation reduction(01:14:12) Building the next OTA: tokenization, QA at scale, and simplicity(01:21:01) Red teaming, visibility, and why behavioral control is the next frontierGuest bio: Yagub Rahimov is CEO and founder of Polygraf AI, a company specializing in behavioral security, contextual privacy, and AI risk management for enterprise clients. He works across defense, financial services, and enterprise technology sectors, and is an active contributor to conversations on AI behavioral control at venues including the Gartner Security Summit. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yrahimov/ | Company: https://polygraf.ai/About the Podcast: The Travel Tech Podcast features long-form conversations with leaders across travel and technology. The show explores how software, data, operations, and distribution come together in real businesses, with an emphasis on tradeoffs, incentives, and lessons that transfer beyond any single company or role.Host bio: Alex Brooker is the founder of Airside Labs, an AI business that applies aviation-grade testing and compliance rigor to enterprise AI systems. Before founding Airside Labs, he built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety-critical domains, and he invests in early-stage technology ventures. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-brooker-2280002/
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  You Can't Vibe Code a Tour Operator 08.06.2026 54min

  The travel industry is ten years behind on tech, and AI itinerary builders are making it worse, not better.Alex Ragin is the founder of Zoftify, a travel focused software agency, and Tourseta, a booking and operations platform built specifically for high volume multi day tour operators. In this conversation, he draws on a decade of building software inside the travel industry to explain why the operational complexity of group travel is so routinely underestimated, why vibe coded solutions collapse against real world edge cases, and where AI is actually delivering value versus where it is still mostly a demo.What You'll LearnTravel tech complexity: The industry is not one market but a collection of micro industries (airlines, hotels, tour operators, cruises), each with distinct workflows that make cross vertical software almost impossible to build well.The AI use case filter: The most reliable test for a legitimate AI application is whether a simpler procedural solution would be faster, cheaper, and more reliable, and in most cases it would be.Itinerary builder limitations: AI itinerary tools still require manual validation at every step because missing supplier data causes errors that directly damage traveler trust and booking relationships.The vibe coding ceiling: Code represents roughly 20% of what makes a complex software product work; the remaining 80% is domain knowledge, process design, and edge case handling that AI cannot yet substitute.Where AI is genuinely productive: Internal development workflows, UI/UX auditing, and unstructured data analysis are the areas where Zoftify has seen consistent, measurable productivity gains from AI tooling.The AI search shift: Tour operators are already seeing meaningful lead quality from ChatGPT and Gemini referrals, often outperforming traditional Google traffic on conversion, and this is where the real near term disruption is happening.Niche focus as a business strategy: Tourseta deliberately avoids FIT and day tour operators to stay laser focused on the bookable multi day, high volume segment, a sub vertical with almost no specialized competition.The group travel operations problem: Managing a 25 or 50 person tour involves payment installment tracking, passport data collection, rooming list management, supplier confirmation, and last minute changes at a scale where a single missed step creates outsized downstream problems.Time Stamped Highlights(00:00) Introduction: Group Travel Is Harder Than It Looks(02:07) How Zoftify Started: From Two-Person Consultancy to Travel Agency(04:09) Why the Travel Industry Chose Them (Not the Other Way Around)(06:24) What Makes Travel Tech So Complex: Micro-Industries Within the Industry(10:12) AI Hype in 2022 vs. AI Requests in 2026: What's Actually Changed(14:14) Where AI Earns Its Place: Development, UX Audits, and Data Analysis(19:20) The Chatbot Reality Check: When 70% Resolution Rates Don't Show Up(22:47) Why Itinerary Builders Still Need a Human in the Loop(28:29) You Can't Vibe Code a Tour Operator: The 80% Problem(31:41) Tourseta's Origin: Building the Same Platform Seven Times Before Productizing(36:54) The Multi-Day Tour Operations Stack: Payments, Manifests, Rooming Lists(43:06) Where the Industry Is Headed: AI Search, GDS Adaptation, and Distribution Gaps(48:31) Opportunities Alex Won't Chase: Cruises, Corporate Travel Niches, and More(49:31) How to Reach Alex: LinkedIn, Zoftify, and ToursetaGuest BioAlex Ragin is the founder of Zoftify, a travel focused software development agency, and Tourseta, a booking and operations platform for multi day tour operators. He has been building software for the travel industry since 2015, with prior experience in fintech and video streaming for major UK broadcasters. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-ragin/ | Zoftify: https://zoftify.com/ | Tourseta: https://tourseta.com/About the PodcastThe Travel Tech Podcast features long-form conversations with leaders across travel and technology. The show explores how software, data, operations, and distribution come together in real businesses, with an emphasis on tradeoffs, incentives, and lessons that transfer beyond any single company or role.Host BioAlex Brooker is the founder of Airside Labs, an AI business that applies aviation-grade testing and compliance rigor to enterprise AI systems. Before founding Airside Labs, he built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety-critical domains. He also invests in early-stage technology ventures and advocates for practical, real-world AI deployment strategies. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-brooker-2280002/
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  The New Olive: How GLP-1 Drugs Could Save Airlines $580M 02.06.2026 48min

  The only sustainable innovations that actually scale are the ones customers never have to think about. Josh Dorfman has spent two decades building them.Josh Dorfman is the co-founder of Planted (plantdmaterials.com), a materials startup building structural panels from fast-growing grass as a direct replacement for wood-derived products in U.S. home construction. He came up through consumer sustainability media (books, Sirius radio, TV) under the Lazy Environmentalist brand before pivoting to B2B climate technology. In this conversation, Josh and Alex explore the mechanics of low-friction sustainability across building materials, aviation, carbon credits, and the unexpected efficiency gains hiding in the GLP-1 drug story.What You'll LearnThe Drop-In Rule: Sustainable materials only reach scale when they integrate into existing workflows without asking the customer to change anything.B2B green sales: Even the most environmentally committed executive cannot justify a purchase on environmental grounds alone. The product has to win on performance and price first.The Trove playbook: Climate companies that succeed eventually stop leading with climate, treating sustainability as a downstream brand benefit rather than the sales pitch.Carbon credits: Voluntary offset schemes largely transfer the cost of an airline's impact onto consumers while delivering minimal real-world emissions reduction.GLP-1 and aviation: Jefferies estimates adoption of weight-loss drugs like Ozempic could save U.S. airlines around $580M annually in fuel costs, about 1.5% of fuel spend. Jefferies separately modelled a 2% weight reduction translating to roughly 4% EPS uplift. The point: the most significant efficiency wins are often not engineering solutions. Battery cost curves: Declining battery costs are already reshaping U.S. power grid additions (51% solar, 28% battery storage projected for the next 12 months) and will accelerate electric aviation faster than most forecasts assume.Grass over trees: Planted's core material grows 10x faster than timber and can be harvested annually, enabling carbon sequestration at a scale that tree-planting programs cannot match.Storytelling as company-building: In a venture-backed startup, the founder is simultaneously selling the company and the product. The skill set required is identical.Timestamped Highlights(00:00) Introduction: IATA 2050 targets, SAF adoption, and why materials innovation matters(00:31) Josh's origin story: The Lazy Environmentalist, Vivavi furniture, and going green in Brooklyn(07:01) The pivot: from consumer media to B2B climate materials(12:49) Why sustainability pitches fail, and what actually drives B2B purchasing decisions(18:56) The Trove case study: Fight Club rules for climate companies(25:03) How Planted was born: a SpaceX engineer, six trash bags of hemp, and a phone call(32:52) Testing every biomass: from hemp to Halloween hay(38:41) Bringing it to aviation: SAF, the GLP-1 surprise, and the $580M olive(32:33) Carbon credits: why they're mostly marketing, and what airlines should do instead(38:00) Planted's roadmap: biochar, graphene, and potential aviation materials(43:50) Battery technology and why the cost curve matters more than regulation(44:06) What's coming in 2026 for Planted: furniture launch, new panel systems, homebuilder announcements(49:50) Ground fleet electrification and the Our World reusable cup trialGuest bio Josh Dorfman is the co-founder and CEO of Planted (plantdmaterials.com), a North Carolina-based materials company producing structural building panels from perennial grass as a timber replacement. He previously built the Lazy Environmentalist media brand across books, Sirius Satellite Radio, and television, and hosts the Super Cool podcast (getsuper.cool/podcast), which covers climate technology and founders. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dorfmanjosh/About the Podcast The Travel Tech Podcast features long-form conversations with leaders across travel and technology, exploring how software, data, operations, and distribution come together in real businesses  with an emphasis on tradeoffs, incentives, and lessons that transfer beyond any single company or role.Host bio Alex Brooker is the founder of Airside Labs, an aviation AI agency applying aviation-grade testing and compliance rigour to AI systems in safety critical and regulated domains. Before founding Airside Labs, he built and scaled complex software across aviation and both business and safety critical domains. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alex-brooker-2280002/
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  Vibe Booking: Hotel data Is Not AI Ready. Here's Why 25.05.2026 17min

  The travel tech stack has a dirty secret: the more suppliers connect to each other, the higher the chance your inventory ends up competing against itself.Olivier Boinet is the founder of room-matching.com and Omnitravel.ai, two tools built to solve the data normalization and room-mapping problems at the root of travel distribution chaos. In this conversation, Alex and Olivier work through why hotel data loses quality and identity as it moves through the distribution chain, how the current API landscape creates circular inventory loops, and what hoteliers need to do right now to ensure AI search agents can find and trust their properties.What You'll LearnRoom mapping: Identical hotel rooms listed under different names and codes across suppliers create significant matching errors that still require manual comparison in most agencies.Data normalization: Pushing inventory through intermediary systems strips away a hotel's personality, including the specific content, offers, and experiences that differentiate the property.Distribution loops: In B2B travel, strategic partnerships between suppliers are so interlocking that a hotel's own inventory can circulate back to it through a chain of partners, marked up along the way.AI discoverability: LLMs evaluate hotels first as websites. If a property's content isn't structured for machine legibility, it won't surface in AI-powered search results or recommendations.Dynamic content personalization: Corpus-based retrieval architectures allow a single property's content to respond differently depending on whether the searcher is a Gen Z solo traveler, a British couple, or a corporate booker.Vibe booking: High-quality, experience-focused content drives significantly higher conversion, whether the audience is a human or an LLM scanning for properties to recommend.Direct booking imperative: As LLMs increasingly route booking intent straight to properties, hotels without structured, AI-ready web pages will lose direct channel share to those that have invested in content quality.The confirmation paradox: The industry-wide check-recheck-check loop across API chains consumes enormous resources and still produces availability errors, a structural inefficiency that AI pressure is beginning to expose.Time-Stamped Highlights(00:00) Introduction and context: the fake hotel booking episode that sparked this conversation(00:01:17) Olivier's origin story: from software developer to travel agency floor shock(00:02:00) 20 agents, 10 portals each: the room comparison problem in practice(00:03:05) Building room-matching.com: applying NLP and heuristics to dynamic room deduplication(00:05:00) The normalization trap: why pushing data through intermediaries erases hotel identity(00:06:14) Omnitravel's approach: using the live website as the source of truth for AI-ready data(00:09:22) The circular inventory problem: how B2B partnerships create self-distribution loops(00:11:23) What LLMs are actually doing when they evaluate hotel websites(00:13:10) Dynamic personalization via corpus-based retrieval: serving different content to different traveler profiles(00:10:40) Vibe booking: why content quality is now a distribution strategy(00:09:01) The check-recheck-check loop and its cost to the industry(00:15:14) Open-source tools that can power personalized AI content distribution todayGuest bioOlivier Boinet is the founder of room-matching.com, a dynamic room-mapping platform used across the travel industry, and Omnitravel.ai, a data normalization and AI-readiness tool for hotels and tour operators. With 30 years of software development experience spanning antivirus heuristics, NLP, and travel technology, he brings an unusually technical lens to the distribution and content quality problems facing the hospitality sector. Connect with him at linkedin.com/in/olivier-boinet-3b328023, room-matching.com, and omnitravel.ai.About the PodcastThe Travel Tech Podcast features long-form conversations with leaders across travel and technology, exploring how software, data, operations, and distribution come together in real businesses, with an emphasis on tradeoffs, incentives, and lessons that transfer beyond any single company or role.Host bioAlex Brooker is the founder of Airside Labs, an AI business that applies aviation-grade testing and compliance rigor to enterprise AI systems. Before founding Airside Labs, he built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety-critical domains. He also invests in early-stage technology ventures and advocates for thoughtful, real-world AI deployment strategies. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alex-brooker-2280002
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  The Day We Killed the Date Picker 19.05.2026 49min

  What if the AI moment in travel is less about building a better OTA, and more about making the OTA unnecessary?Christopher Olivares is the solo founder of Elyo (elyo.io), a conversational AI travel assistant that helps travelers find the cheapest flights across flexible destinations and dates, with no commissions, intermediaries, or date pickers. In this episode, Christopher traces his path from OECD policy analyst and expat traveler to vibe-coded solopreneur, and explains how generative AI unlocked both the product idea and the ability to build it without a technical background. The conversation covers the incentive problems embedded in OTAs, the economics of airline distribution, the future of travel discovery, and why AI may finally enable a return to genuinely traveler-first service.What You'll LearnTraveler intent vs. traveler input: Elyo is built around decomposing what a traveler wants (cheapest meeting point, most flexible weekend, best value destination) rather than the rigid inputs legacy search UIs require.The OTA commission problem: Using a "free" platform isn't free. Commissions get reflected in prices, and the traveler absorbs costs they never see.Freemium as a trust mechanism: Elyo's subscription model exists specifically so the platform doesn't have to earn commissions, which keeps the traveler's interest as the unconditional North Star.AI as a leveler for solo founders: Christopher built Elyo without any prior coding experience, using LLMs both to imagine the product and to build it, illustrating a real shift in who can launch a technical startup.GDS access is getting harder for startups: At least one major GDS has closed its developer portal, raising barriers for early-stage builders trying to validate ideas before committing to full commercialization.The seller-of-record problem: Many white-label distribution APIs make startups the seller of record for tickets, a liability that most early-stage founders (Elyo included) want no part of.AI as a return to the travel agent era: By removing the human cost of advisory, AI can deliver the personalization of pre-internet travel agents alongside the price transparency the metasearch era created, without the commission layer.Corporate travel is an underserved use case: The remote-team "where should we rendezvous?" problem is a direct extension of Elyo's core optimization, and today's corporate booking platforms remain shockingly poor on UX.Time-Stamped Highlights(00:00) Introduction and episode overview(00:01:14) Christopher's background: diplomacy, teaching English in Japan and Spain, and the OECD(00:04:26) The data standards challenge: why counting schools is harder than it sounds(00:07:05) The original idea: meeting friends in a cheap third city(00:10:34) Why generative AI unlocked both the product concept and the build(00:14:19) Elyo: what it is, how it works, and why the date picker had to die(00:24:12) The traveler-first business model: freemium, no commissions, direct airline links(00:32:07) Navigating airline distribution: GDSs, NDC, white-label APIs, and the seller-of-record problem(00:37:45) Incentive structures in travel: why "free" platforms aren't free(00:40:01) The AI moment in travel distribution: OTA integrations into chat services(00:44:45) Corporate travel and the remote-team rendezvous use case(00:45:51) The return of the travel agent: personalization plus democratization(00:48:12) Early adopters, honest pricing, and what's coming next for Elyo(00:47:37) Where to find Elyo and the origin of the nameGuest BioChristopher Olivares is the solo founder of Elyo, a conversational AI travel assistant. Before launching Elyo, he spent four and a half years at the OECD in Paris working on internal ethics, education policy, and international statistical indicators, and is currently completing an executive master's in statistics and artificial intelligence at Université Paris Dauphine. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-olivares-40b8b283/Elyo: https://elyo.io/?ref=travel-tech-podcast&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast About the PodcastThe Travel Tech Podcast features long-form conversations with leaders across travel and technology, exploring how software, data, operations, and distribution come together in real businesses, with an emphasis on tradeoffs, incentives, and lessons that transfer beyond any single company or role.Host BioAlex Brooker is the founder of Airside Labs, an AI business that applies aviation-grade testing and compliance rigor to building enterprise AI systems. Before founding Airside Labs, he built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety-critical domains. He also invests in early-stage technology ventures and advocates for thoughtful, real-world AI deployment strategies. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-brooker-2280002/