Travel Tech Podcast

Ann Cederhall

Airlines have spent a decade trying to modernise their retailing, yet most still cannot change, refund, or even verify what they sell. Ann Cederhall, co-founder of LeapShift and one of the original architects of Lufthansa's NDC Direct Connect, unpacks the structural failures behind that paradox — from a 12-year servicing gap in the NDC standard to billions in annual revenue leakage that nobody can afford to chase.

Yagub Rahimov

Ninety-six percent of data breaches trace back to human behavior, not model failure — so why does the industry keep hardening the AI while leaving the human untouched? Yagub Rahimov, CEO and founder of Polygraf AI, unpacks how AI agents have created a dangerous new user type in enterprise security, why travel companies are quietly committing serious privacy violations at the gate, and what genuinely secure AI-powered travel infrastructure would actually require.

Alex Ragin

AI can write code, but it cannot substitute for a decade of hard-won domain knowledge inside one of the most operationally complex industries on earth. Alex Ragin, founder of travel software agency Zoftify and multi-day tour operator platform Tourseta, unpacks why travel tech is routinely underestimated, where vibe-coded solutions collapse against real-world edge cases, and where AI is actually delivering measurable value versus generating impressive demos.

Josh Dorfman

The only sustainable innovations that actually scale are the ones customers never have to think about. Josh Dorfman — the Lazy Environmentalist turned climate-materials founder — joins Alex to unpack low-friction sustainability across building materials, aviation and carbon credits, including the Jefferies estimate that weight-loss drugs could quietly save US airlines around $580M a year in fuel.

Olivier Boinet

The travel tech stack has a dirty secret: the more suppliers connect to each other, the higher the chance a hotel's inventory ends up competing against itself. Olivier Boinet explains why hotel data loses identity as it moves through the distribution chain, and what hoteliers need to do now so AI search agents can find and trust their properties.

Christopher Olivares

What if the AI moment in travel is less about building a better OTA, and more about making the OTA unnecessary? Christopher Olivares traces his path from OECD policy analyst to solo founder of Elyo — a conversational travel assistant that ditches date pickers, commissions, and intermediaries in favour of decomposing what a traveller actually wants.

Jim Hetzel

Airline distribution is sitting on decades of tech debt — fragmented standards, incompatible NDC versions, and pricing logic so intricate that even GDS engines miss valid fares. Jim Hetzel makes the case that AI could finally be the orchestration layer the industry has needed for fifty years.

Fred Bean

Hotels are sitting on millions in uncollected revenue and corrupted content — and most of them don't even know it. Fred Bean explains why governed data is the prerequisite for every meaningful AI deployment in hospitality.

Jen Reid-Schram, Oliver Deakin

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.

Mike Putman

How AI agents and MCP-powered infrastructure are rebuilding travel distribution — from multi-year engineering projects to minute-scale deployments that shift power from brands to personalised agents.

Kraettli L. Epperson

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.

Anne Marie Pellerin

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.

Ian Painter, Oli Deakin, Adrian McKenzie

AI adoption inside teams is not following the narrative most people expect — in some cases, experienced engineers actually become slower when adopting AI tools.

Eric Leopold

How the aviation industry coordinated a global shift from magnetic stripe to barcode technology on boarding passes — a transition that delivered over $1.5 billion in annual savings.

Professor Achim Czerny

Airport economics through the lens of revenue generation — why airports don't profit directly from flight slots, how non-aeronautical revenue outperforms landing charges, and how regulatory price caps reshape pricing incentives.

Martin Bowman

How airport operations still rely on decades-old systems — and why Heathrow's adoption of the AIRHART platform signals a shift from traditional Airport Operations Databases toward configurable platform architectures.

Amit Ganjoo

Aviation's infrastructure challenges through the lens of telecommunications history — why interoperability and regulatory alignment from telecom's transition apply to modern drone systems, UTM, and advanced air mobility.

Ian Painter, Oli Deakin, Adrian McKenzie

AI "bubble" talk usually collapses into a lazy binary: everything is hype, or everything is inevitable. In this episode, we break it apart properly — drawing on years of building and operating aviation data platforms where reliability and cost structures matter more than narratives.

Dustin Gimbel

Indoor navigation solutions in aviation environments — how RouteMe's video-based approach is transforming wayfinding across airports, airlines, and healthcare.

Leo Kotil

How AI systems can support frontline aviation teams by improving access to critical information during operations — from NOTAMs to EFB fragmentation.

James Dunthorne

Why beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) drone operations are constrained by surveillance infrastructure and detection physics — not aircraft capability.

Ian Painter, Oliver Deakin, Adrian McKenzie

How AI efficiency gains may actually increase demand for human expertise. A panel discussion about AI transforming developer and PM roles, commoditization risks, and Jevons Paradox applied to knowledge work.