Travel Tech Podcast

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...

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...

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 Learn

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...

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 de...

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...

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 mod...

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...

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...

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 Learn

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

Airline distribution is sitting on decades of tech debt and AI might be the only thing that can fix it.

Jim Hetzel is a travel and airline technology veteran who now leads retailing strategy at TWAI. In this conversation, he traces the full arc of airline distribution from fragmented pre-GDS ticketing to the NDC standards work and makes the case that AI is positioned to become the new orchestration layer the industry desperately needs. The discussion also explores the trust problem that no one in the AI agent era has solved yet: who plays the role of...

Hotels are sitting on millions in uncollected revenue and corrupted content and most of them don't even know it.

Fred Bean is the founder of HotelPORT, a hospitality content governance and distribution technology company he launched in 2019 after three decades working across hotel reservations, GDS connectivity, and online distribution. His career spans roles at Hyatt, Sabre, and TravelWeb, where he helped build foundational infrastructure for hotel bookings online. 

This conversation covers the persistent structural problems in hotel distribution from inaccurate third-party content and uncollected OTA payments to the misapplication of AI and how g...

AI is rapidly changing the economics of software: code is cheaper to generate than ever, but significantly harder to reason about, validate, and secure. As systems become more automated, the real constraint is no longer building functionality, it’s maintaining confidence in what those systems will actually do once deployed.

To unpack this shift, Alex Brooker is joined by Jen Reid-Schram, an AI practitioner and former VP of Technology with deep roots in QA, engineering leadership, and executive transformation. Jen brings a systems-level view of how quality thinking evolved inside engineering teams—and why it m...

For decades, building a travel business meant stitching together fragmented supply: GDS systems, hotel APIs, pricing layers, and fulfillment infrastructure. It was complex, expensive, and slow to scale.

Now, that’s changing fast.

With the rise of AI agents and MCP-powered infrastructure, what once took years of engineering can now be deployed in minutes—fundamentally shifting who can participate in the travel ecosystem, and how distribution works.

Mike Putman, CEO and Founder of Custom Travel Solutions, has been at the center of this evolution—from launching one of the earliest online travel agencies in the...

The US is about to publish rules that let drones fly beyond line of sight routinely — here's what that unlocks.

Part 108, the FAA's upcoming rulemaking for beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations, is set to change the economics of commercial drone flight. For the first time, operators will have a clear regulatory path to fly without visual observers — making routine, scalable drone operations commercially viable.

Kraettli L. Epperson, Co-Founder and CEO of Vigilant Aerospace, has spent years building the detect-and-avoid systems that make this possible. His focus isn't the...

Queues move, bags get scanned, and passengers eventually make it through. But beneath that surface is a fragile operational layer held together by fragmented systems, manual workarounds, and frontline teams stitching together processes in real time.

Anne Marie Pellerin has seen both sides of that system—designing queue segmentation at TSA that improved throughput, and later discovering that when security systems fail, the response is often disconnected, slow, and opaque.

This conversation goes beyond passenger experience into something more fundamental: how airports actually recover when critical systems break—and why solving that requires rethinking how...

AI adoption inside teams is not following the narrative most people expect. In some cases, the most experienced engineers—the ones expected to benefit the most—are actually getting slower.

That friction reveals something deeper. The challenge is not just about tools or capability. It’s about trust, accountability, and how work itself is structured. In high-stakes environments, where someone must sign off and take responsibility, AI doesn’t simply slot in—it fundamentally reshapes how teams operate.

This conversation with Alex, Ian, Oli, and Adrian explores what happens when AI moves from experiment...

That quick moment at the gate when you pull up a boarding pass on your phone and scan a QR code feels routine now. It isn’t.

That interaction represents one of the most successful global standards ever deployed in aviation—a shift from magnetic stripes to barcodes that saved the industry over $1.5 billion annually. But the real story isn’t the technology. It’s how an entire industry coordinated across competitors, regulators, and infrastructure to make it work.

Eric Leopold spent 15 years at IATA working on exactly that kind of industry plumbing. In this episode...

Airports look like infrastructure businesses. Runways, terminals, aircraft movements. It’s easy to assume they make their money from planes.

But some of the most valuable assets at capacity-constrained airports—slots—generate no direct revenue for the airport at all. Meanwhile, car parks can outperform landing fees, retail margins influence pricing strategy, and regulation quietly determines why your drop-off charge keeps rising.

Professor Achim Czerny has spent decades studying airport economics. In this conversation, he breaks down the real incentive structures shaping airport behavior—from slot allocation and price caps to transfer competition and why a €9 cof...

Hot on the heels of Heathrow Airport’s decision to use AIRHART as its digital backbone and with the Passenger Terminal Expo in London next week, in this episode, I speak with Martin Bowman, Chief Strategy Officer at Smarter Airports. 

Airport operations are still largely built on systems designed decades ago. Many of the technologies coordinating flights, gates, stands, and turnaround processes trace their lineage back to architectures conceived in the 1980s. They solved a critical problem at the time—distributing flight data across the airport ecosystem—but they were never designed for the integration depth, operational complex...

Aviation’s next scaling challenge isn’t about aircraft performance or autonomy. It’s about whether the invisible systems behind the scenes can interoperate, certify, and operate reliably in a highly regulated world.

Amit Ganjoo has lived this problem twice. Before founding ANRA Technologies, he worked in telecoms during the era when fragmented standards made global connectivity impossible. Scale only arrived once interoperability, shared frameworks, and regulatory alignment replaced proprietary black boxes.

In this episode, Amit explains how those same lessons now apply to drones, UTM, and advanced air mobility. He walks through why complex system...

AI “bubble” talk usually collapses into a lazy argument: either everything is hype, or everything is inevitable. Rather than picking a side, this discussion breaks the topic into clearer components: public market valuations, hyperscaler infrastructure spending, and a fast-growing layer of venture-backed startups selling “AI strategy” before they have durable product advantage.

Alex, Ian, Oli, and Adrian have spent years building and operating real platforms in aviation data—systems where reliability, cost structures, and incentives matter more than narratives. They bring that operator lens to the AI moment: what genuinely looks bubble-like, what looks structural...

Indoor wayfinding fails in the exact moments it matters most: when someone is stressed, unfamiliar with the space, short on time, or navigating in a second language. Airports and hospitals amplify that pressure, and traditional indoor navigation systems often add friction—apps, logins, hardware dependencies, and imprecise positioning—right when users have the least cognitive bandwidth.

Dustin Gimbel is the co-founder of RouteMe, a video-based indoor navigation platform designed to remove that friction entirely. Instead of relying on GPS-like abstractions indoors, RouteMe uses recorded video routes that people can preview before arrival or follow on-site, without downloading an a...

Aviation safety depends on having the right information at the right moment. The problem is that the information is fragmented, voluminous, and hard to retrieve when no flight is entirely the same. In non-standard situations, crews aren’t short on rules—they’re short on time to find and verify the one that matters.

Leo Kotil built Overwatch AI after spending a decade in the cockpit and airline operations. His bet is simple: GenAI is most valuable in aviation when it turns manuals, NOTAMs, and operational data into fast, source-backed answers that crews can verify...

Most drone use cases fail for a surprisingly mundane reason: they can’t safely or legally scale past a few hundred meters. The aircraft are capable of flying kilometers, but operations collapse once you factor in regulatory limits, detection physics, and fragile surveillance infrastructure.

James Dunthorne has encountered this constraint from every angle. From PhD research on collision avoidance to early agricultural drone deployments and high-precision surveying over railways and landmark sites, he’s seen exactly where theory breaks when exposed to real airspace.

This conversation digs into what actually blocks BVLOS operations: mixed transponder envi...

AI is making knowledge work faster — but it’s also surfacing an uncomfortable tension: when the “doing” becomes cheap, the limiting factor shifts to everything humans do around it. This tension shows up in two places at once: inside engineering teams (identity, craft, and maintainability) and inside go-to-market (trust, distribution, and buying behavior).

In this episode, Ian Painter, Oliver Deakin, and Adrian McKenzie approach this from lived experience rather than speculation. They have built and scaled data-intensive travel technology, operated deep inside enterprise environments, and navigated acquisition into a public-market business. Instead of defaulting to debates about job loss...