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 mid-90s to building the infrastructure powering modern AI-driven booking systems.

This episode explores how travel distribution is being rebuilt, why agents—not brands—may control the customer relationship, and what it means when any company can become a travel seller overnight.

What You’ll Learn

• Building a travel booking engine has gone from multi-year projects to minutes with AI agents
• The real complexity in travel isn’t search—it’s data normalization, deduplication, and pricing logic
• Agentic AI shifts power away from brands toward personalized user-controlled experiences
• Loyalty programs may weaken as agents optimize for outcomes, not brand preference
• The “last mile” problems—like booking failures at hotels—still cost the industry ~2% of transactions
• AI can now solve operational gaps (like reconfirmation) that were previously too expensive to fix with humans
• Travel distribution is becoming infrastructure-first, where aggregation layers power entire ecosystems
• In the future, agents may transact directly with other agents, reshaping how commerce works

Time-Stamped Highlights

• (01:03) Early Days of Online Travel 
• (01:55) Evolution of Travel Technology 
• (03:11) Launch of 11th Hour Vacations 
• (04:10) Gaining First Customers 
• (06:03) Pre-Google Search Engines 
• (07:02) Partnership with Lastminute.com 
• (09:18) Amadeus Acquisition and OneTravel 
• (10:19) How Custom Travel Solutions Works 
• (14:34) Lessons from Previous Ventures 
• (16:20) Scaling Challenges 
• (18:23) AI in Travel Industry 
• (32:39) Future of Agentic AI in Travel 

Guest

Mike Putman — CEO & Founder, Custom Travel Solutions
Mike Putman is a travel industry veteran with over four decades of experience across distribution and technology. He founded one of the earliest online travel agencies in the 1990s and has since worked with major global travel brands. Today, he leads Custom Travel Solutions, building infrastructure that powers modern travel booking, including AI-driven aggregation, agentic APIs, and back-office automation tools.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeputman/
Company: https://customtravelsolutions.com
Routestack: Routestack.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

Alex Brooker — Founder, Airside Labs
Alex is an engineer, technology leader, and founder with deep expertise in mission-critical systems and AI oversight. He leads 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, Alex built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety-critical domains, blending product innovation with disciplined engineering practices. 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/

🔍 Explore 6,500+ Aviation AI Use Cases. We've catalogued over 6,500 real AI applications across airlines, airports, ATM, MRO, and more into an interactive browser. Filter by sector and see where AI is actually being deployed across aviation: airsidelabs.com/aviation-use-cases

Brought To You By

Airside Labs — Airside Labs supports aviation and travel operators with tools to test, deploy, and scale modern data and AI systems in safety-critical environments. Learn more at https://airsidelabs.com.