Travel Tech Podcast
The Travel Tech Podcast, hosted by Alex Brooker, features long-form conversations with leaders in travel and technology. It explores 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. Alex Brooker is an industry veteran with experience in aviation, startup exits, and AI transformation.
Episodes
Code Is Twenty Percent of the Thing
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: co
The Pricing Fight Inside Every Airline
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
Trust as Infrastructure: Who Your AI Travel Agent Actually Works For
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 Pu
ChatGPT Said the Visa Would Be Accepted. It Wasn't.
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 t
The Deal AI Can Never Find
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 comm
Above China, Your Starlink Doesn't Exist
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
Why Can't I Just Book My Own Trip? Dual Identity, Dreadful Booking Tools and the Real Job of Corporate Travel
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 i
89% of Airline Carts Never Convert
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
The Feedback You Don't Notice You're Getting
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
An Airline Is Just a Software Stack Nobody Finished Building
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 servic
Nobody Would Fund a Human for This
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 Mar
Fly First, Regulate Later: Why Europe's Rules Are Pushing Drones Abroad
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 t
The Real AI Bottleneck in Travel Content Is Copyright, Not Hallucination
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 p
Travel Inspiration Lives on TikTok. The Booking Still Lives in 47 Browser Tabs.
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 conve
Computer Says No: Why Airlines Won't Take Your Upgrade Money
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
96% Human Error: Why AI Security Starts with the Human, Not the Model
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 envi
You Can't Vibe Code a Tour Operator
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 w
The New Olive: How GLP-1 Drugs Could Save Airlines $580M
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 consume
Vibe Booking: Hotel data Is Not AI Ready. Here's Why
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
The Day We Killed the Date Picker
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 pa
50 Years of tech debt, AI enters the chat
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 orch
Fix the Data First: A Contrarian's Guide to AI in Hospitality
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
Zero-Days, Superintelligence, and the Collapse of Software Assumptions
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, a
The 5-Minute Build That Breaks Traditional Travel Tech
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 partic
What’s Actually Stopping Air Taxis From Taking Off
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
The Real Reason One Broken Machine Disrupts an Entire Airport
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 tha
Why AI Is Slowing Down Experts Before It Speeds Up Work (Brooker, Painter, Deakin, McKenzie)
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 someon
How a Simple Barcode Saved Airlines $1.5 Billion and Replaced Paper Tickets
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 coordi
Why Your Istanbul Airport Sandwich Costs €22: The Economics Behind Drop-Off Fees and Retail
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 determin
Airports Still Run on 1980s Software: Why the Industry Is Moving Beyond AODB-Centric Operations
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 proc
The Telecom-to-Aviation Playbook for Scaling Airspace Systems
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.
Is AI in a Bubble? What Happens When Hype Meets Regulation
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, O
“Dude, where’s my car?”: The Hidden Cost of Broken Indoor Navigation
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.Dus
This Ex-Pilot Is Building AI for the Cockpit
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 air
Beyond Line of Sight: The Infrastructure Drones Need to Fly
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 avo
Jevons Paradox for Knowledge Work
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, Oliv
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