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Nobody Would Fund a Human for This
Nobody would fund a human team to call every hotel and confirm every booking — and that precise economics gap is exactly what makes AI the right tool for the job. Mike Putnam, Anne Marie Pellerin, Yagub Rahimov, and Fred Bean are four founders who reached the same insight from opposite corners of travel and aviation, and host Alex Brooker lets each of them make the case in their own words.
Show Notes
Mike Putnam, founder of Custom Travel Solutions, built reconfirm.ai after identifying that roughly two percent of hotel reservations quietly disappear inside distribution systems — travel gateways, hub switches, bed banks — leaving guests stranded at the front desk. His platform places AI-driven calls directly to properties before arrival, confirming booking details and capturing the internal hotel confirmation number that binds the reservation together, at a cost that no human team could justify. Anne Marie Pellerin brings the same instinct to airport operations, where her failure engine uses AI to analyze equipment breakdowns and automatically calls service engineers in the middle of the night — but she argues the bigger prize, predictive maintenance, is blocked not by AI capability but by the absence of a single unified dataset spanning frontline paper logs, call center software, IT systems, and vendor platforms. Yagub Rahimov puts hard numbers on why this is all suddenly viable: processing a call for transcription and analysis runs five to ten cents while saving an organization around two hundred dollars in support time, and his gateway approach anonymizes customer data with a single base-URL swap before it ever reaches a language model. Fred Bean, founder of Hotel Port, rounds out the picture with a counterpoint — voice AI adoption depends on fast, obvious human off-ramps, and he expects text and messaging channels to ultimately overtake voice as the dominant interface for these interactions.
Click to expand the full episode transcript (2,610 words approx.)
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About the Travel Tech Podcast
Hosted by Alex Brooker, founder of Airside Labs, the Travel Tech Podcast features authentic long-form conversations with leaders, innovators, and startup founders shaping the future of aviation and travel technology. No scripts, no sponsors, no sales pitches — just real conversations about building technology that matters.