Travel Tech Podcast

Your passengers are already filming the trip, and the brands that collect that footage will learn far more than what was booked.

Sally Bunnell is the CEO and founder of NaviSavi, a travel video platform that licenses a library of roughly 250,000 user generated travel videos and makes that content bookable across websites and loyalty programs, with on board systems next. She talks with Alex about why authentic traveler footage outperforms branded and AI generated video. The conversation also covers how airlines can trade miles for passenger video and data, and what it took to keep a travel startup alive through a pandemic launch and a brutal funding market.

What You'll Learn

• Enterprise sales cycles: Relationships Sally started at World Aviation Festival Singapore took two and a half years to turn into a client.
• Departmental ownership: Video spans marketing, loyalty, product and inflight entertainment, so airlines often stall on deciding which team owns it.
• UGC versus branded content: Studies Sally cites show user generated travel video earns roughly four times the click-throughs of branded content.
• Video and basket size: A partner study across hundreds of websites found spend rose by about $100 for each video watched before booking.
• Destination dupes: AI generated destination footage risks losing traveler trust the moment the real place fails to match the video.
• Loyalty as a data channel: Airlines can offer miles for trip videos and gain first person behavioural data that transaction records never capture.
• Content moderation: Paying $1 per approved video attracted screen recorded and recropped uploads, so NaviSavi now runs an AI screening layer before human review.
• What performs: First person footage with a clear subject and an attention hook beats static scenery, with most clips running 10 to 15 seconds.

Time Stamped Highlights

• (0:00) Cold open: why travelers want the real deal
• (1:11) Four startup titles after Lisbon, Amsterdam and Singapore
• (3:24) What actually happens after you win Startup of the Year
• (5:20) Proving to enterprise buyers you'll still be here in a year
• (7:42) Everybody wants video, nobody knows which department owns it
• (10:41) Making hotel "things to do" videos bookable
• (11:14) QR codes, guest uploads and miles for footage
• (13:29) A Diet Coke by the pool: building passenger profiles from video
• (16:23) UGC versus branded content, and the problem with destination dupes
• (19:07) $100 per video: the correlation between watching and spending
• (21:56) From the Letterman internship to directing Kidz Bop
• (25:51) Rejected by every network, building it anyway, launching into a pandemic
• (27:56) When Meta asked for travel videos to launch Facebook Reels
• (30:07) Screen recorded fakes and reviewing 250,000 videos by hand
• (34:15) "You work in marketing?" Being a female CEO in aviation
• (36:44) The buy on board vision: from home screen to seatback map
• (38:06) What makes traveler video perform

Guest Bio

Sally Bunnell is the CEO and founder of NaviSavi, a travel video platform serving travelers, creators and brands. Before founding NaviSavi in 2017, she studied broadcast journalism and marketing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, interned at the Late Show with David Letterman, and spent 11 years running video content at a record label, including directing Kidz Bop productions. NaviSavi went through Techstars and was named Startup of the Year at the World Aviation Festival.
 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sallybunnell/ | Website: https://navi-savi.com/

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. He previously built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety critical domains, and invests in early stage technology ventures.
 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-brooker-2280002/

Hotels have spent a decade capturing billions of pixels of their own spaces, and the AI tools now shaping event bookings can't see any of it.

Jascha Kaykas-Wolff is CEO of Visiting Media, the hospitality sales platform behind TrueTour, following more than 20 years at companies including Yahoo, Microsoft, WebTrends, BitTorrent, and Mozilla. He and Alex Brooker discuss how Visiting Media turns immersive property data into content AI answer engines can read. They also cover how he runs about 17 agents across a 140 person company, and why he sees data as the lasting moat.

What You'll Learn

• Data ownership: Businesses should keep control of the data they collect about customers rather than outsource that decision to a model provider.
• Visual to text conversion: Answer engines don't read immersive assets today, so 360 tours must become written descriptions and structured FAQs to aid discovery.
• Synthetic personas: Personas modeled on each buyer type ask hundreds of questions of a property's data, and a council of agents answers them.
• AEO versus SEO: SEO rewards structured data and authority, while answer engines favor content that anticipates conversational questions.
• Learning loops: Hotel teams can't absorb constant model changes, so vendors need to run the feedback loops on their behalf.
• Agent adoption: Company wide chat licenses didn't produce useful adoption at Visiting Media, so it rebuilt around agents tied to department heads.
• Agent visibility: A CEO who isn't an engineer can follow a fleet of agents by having them turn their Markdown files into an HTML "brain" showing fleet health, the messages agents send each other, and broken loops.
• The one rule: Anyone using an agent to communicate must read the output first and understand it well enough to discuss it.
• The moat: Data unique to a business keeps its value as AI tools become better and cheaper.

Time-Stamped Highlights

• (1:47) From Yahoo and Mozilla to hospitality
• (5:59) Why every business should own its data
• (10:14) Capture, enrich, distribute: inside the Visiting Media pipeline
• (16:47) Why answer engines can't see a 360 tour
• (19:06) Synthetic personas and a council of agents
• (21:00) From undiscoverable to number one on ChatGPT
• (24:36) Why hotels can't build their own calluses
• (29:48) Inside a fleet of 17 agents
• (34:56) The HTML brain: making agent work visible
• (37:22) The one rule: read it before you send it
• (42:28) AI staging and the golden hour wedding
• (48:07) AEO, GEO, and predicting the question
• (52:41) Prompts, loops, harnesses, agents: what comes next
• (58:13) Why the data is the moat

Guest bio

Jascha Kaykas-Wolff is CEO of Visiting Media, a role he took on in November 2024 after joining the company as COO. He previously held roles at Yahoo, Microsoft, and WebTrends, and served as CMO at BitTorrent and Mozilla. He also ran a startup in the customer data platform space.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaykas/ | Company: https://visitingmedia.com

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 an engineer, technology leader, and the founder of Airside Labs, which 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.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-brooker-2280002/

One of Eric Bidinger's companies has to justify every rivet to a regulator, while the other ships weekly, and both depend on the same scarce asset.

Eric Bidinger is the founder of Blue Spirit Aero, which is building a hydrogen electric trainer aircraft in Toulouse, and Luca, an AI platform for small businesses. He and Alex talk about why aircraft certification covers the design process as well as the airframe, how institutional know-how disappears at major OEMs, and why the AI model is the least important part of an enterprise AI stack. They also cover moats under global competition, human judgment as agents multiply, and Luca's plan to offer one click business financing.

What You'll Learn

• Certification scope: Aircraft certification covers the design process as well as the airframe, so every decision down to rivet sizing has to be traceable.
• Lost know-how: Long gaps between clean sheet programs mean engineers retire before passing on how to design an aircraft from scratch.
• The four layer stack: Ordered data, memory management, and human taste have to be in place before the AI model adds value.
• Model commoditization: Frontier models have converged enough that the choice between providers matters far less than implementation.
• Messy data risk: AI on unreconciled data hallucinates and speeds you up in the wrong direction.
• Taste as leverage: People with good judgment gain the most from AI, so their share of total output grows.
• Moats in a global market: Remote work and AI have lowered barriers to entry, so a business without a defensible edge competes against everyone.
• Lending on live data: Operational data in real time gives a far better view of a borrower than financial statements that are months out of date.
  
  

Time-Stamped Highlights

• (0:00) Intelligence in a Bottle: Why AI Is Fully Democratized
• (1:45) Leaded Fuel and Cessnas Built 40 Years Ago: The Case for Hydrogen Trainers
• (5:37) Two Companies at Opposite Ends of the Speed Scale
• (7:55) From Airframe to Rivet: What Design Traceability Really Means
• (10:10) Why New Fixed Wing OEMs Almost Never Appear
• (12:08) Airbus, Boeing, and the Disappearing Clean Sheet Skill
• (14:26) Does AI Help or Hurt the Next Generation of Engineers?
• (18:01) The Four Layer Stack: Data, Memory, Taste, Model
• (24:28) Ten Minutes Instead of a Two Month Consulting Engagement
• (31:53) If There's No Moat, Don't Even Start
• (34:56) The Data Flywheel and the J Curve Problem
• (38:33) How Far in the Loop Should Humans Be?
• (45:11) Klarna for Business Loans: One Click Enterprise Capital
• (50:57) Building a Community to Cut Through AI Noise

Guest bio
 Eric Bidinger is the founder of Blue Spirit Aero, a Toulouse company developing a hydrogen electric trainer aircraft for professional pilot schools, and Luca, an AI platform that combines business intelligence with access to capital for small businesses. An engineer by training, he spent about 17 years in large buyout private equity before becoming an entrepreneur, and he co-founded an eco resort in Mozambique.
 LinkedIn: Eric Bidinger | Luca: ask-luca.com | Blue Spirit Aero: bluespiritaero.com | Luca community on Heartbeat: https://community.ask-luca.com/

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 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: linkedin.com/in/alex-brooker-2280002

An AI asked to protect every passenger connection gave a flawless answer: cancel the flights.

 Kevin Hightower is Chief Innovation Officer at Cirium, where he leads Propulsion Labs, the company’s innovation group. He and host Alex Brooker, former colleagues at Cirium, discuss Kevin’s path from oceanic air traffic control at Lockheed Martin to Google’s drone delivery program, how AI is changing product development and decision making in aviation, Cirium’s aviation knowledge graph, and the data interoperability problems holding the industry back.

What You’ll Learn

• Automating the routine: Lockheed’s oceanic ATC system let controllers comfortably manage 30 aircraft instead of a busy 7 to 15 by automating conformance checks and altitude probes.
• The three hour rule: No decision, from buying a car to buying a company, should need more than three hours of actual thought, with data gathering kept separate from thinking.
• Disposable prototypes: When AI cuts build time from months to days, the discipline shifts to throwing work away instead of defending ideas because of the effort already spent.
• AI as an accelerant for learning: Early career engineers who use AI to compress years of learning will outpace those who use it only to do an old job faster.
• Decisions, not dashboards: Most aviation decisions run roughly eight steps, and AI can now carry four or five of them before a human makes the call.
• The aviation knowledge graph: Aviation data starts with an aircraft and links orders, lessors, schedules, and tail swaps, so connecting it unlocks analysis no single dataset can.
• Efficiency before safety: AI will speed up flow management and sequencing well before it touches the safety critical systems that keep aircraft separated.
• The interoperability gap: Multi year, multi million dollar data lake programs rarely deliver usable value, and the real problem is combining data across boundaries while keeping control of it.

Time-Stamped Highlights

• (0:00) Cold open: the AI that cancelled the flights
• (2:04) A Cessna ride to Embry-Riddle
• (4:48) "Do you want to kill people or save people?" Choosing air traffic control
• (6:26) Replacing paper strips over the Pacific
• (9:17) From Lockheed CTO to a quarter million drone deliveries
• (13:10) Why there's no one right way to be a product manager
• (16:22) The three hour decision rule
• (22:03) Formal testing in five minutes, not a few months
• (24:42) Fail fast, then fly everyone to Hawaii
• (32:39) Powering every decision connected to aviation
• (34:40) Behind the dip: analyzing every turn instead of one
• (47:17) Why nobody can predict the Charlotte arrival sequence
• (48:36) Could AI make travel worse for passengers?
• (54:09) Data interoperability and the $10 million data lake

Guest bio
 Kevin Hightower is Chief Innovation Officer at Cirium, where he leads Propulsion Labs after previously serving as the company’s head of product. Before Cirium, he spent about four and a half years with Google’s drone delivery program, building the platform retail partners use to connect to the service, and held CTO roles in the US and UK at Lockheed Martin after starting as a systems engineer on oceanic air traffic control. He holds a BS in aviation computer science and an MS in software engineering from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hightowk | Company: https://www.cirium.com

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 an engineer, technology leader, and founder of Airside Labs, which applies aviation-grade testing and compliance rigor to enterprise AI systems in regulated environments. He previously built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety critical domains, and invests in early-stage technology ventures.
 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-brooker-2280002/

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 Learn

• The 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 problem

Guest bios

• Alex 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.com
• Amit 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 · LinkedIn
• Leo 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.com
• Jim 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.com
• Íñigo Valenzuela is the founder of Smartvel, which provides destination content for travel brands. Full conversation: Episode 24. LinkedIn · smartvel.com
• Christopher 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.io
• Iñaki 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.com

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 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

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 Learn

• AI 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 Connectors

Guest 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

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 Learn

• The 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 Piece

Guest Bios

Eric 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/ericleopold
Christopher 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.com
Nancy 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.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. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-brooker-2280002/

🔎Connect your agent

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 Learn

• Same 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 problem

Guest 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

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 Learn

• Subscriptions 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 aviation

Where to find Caravelo

Iñaki 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 bio

Iñaki 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 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.

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

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

• Offline-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 next
• Closing thoughts: the upcoming Forthcode aviation AI report and what's next

Guest bio

Ajith 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 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. 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.