Travel Tech Podcast

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 fro...

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...

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 air...

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...

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 o...

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 sustai...

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 hot...

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 fro...

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 orchestratio...

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...

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 pr...

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 i...

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 operatio...

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 s...

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 s...

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 ac...

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 y...

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 tr...

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 o...

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...

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 Gimb...

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 ope...

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 t...

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 Deaki...