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Why Can't I Just Book My Own Trip? Dual Identity, Dreadful Booking Tools and the Real Job of Corporate Travel
The same person who books flights effortlessly on their phone becomes a frustrated corporate traveler the moment their company's booking tool enters the picture, and that contradiction is costing the industry more than it realises. Caitlin Gomez, Head of Growth at Amgine, joins Alex Brooker to unpack the dual consumer and business identity at the heart of corporate travel, why legacy tools were never built for the traveler in the first place, and how AI powered middleware can automate the most painful parts of the stack without tearing it down.
Show Notes
Caitlin Gomez is Head of Growth at Amgine (amgine.ai), an AI powered middleware platform that automates the manual, time consuming elements of corporate travel booking, from email and Slack to WhatsApp and group air workflows, without displacing the GDS and TMC infrastructure that enterprise programs depend on. Her career spans TMC sales at HRG and Travel Leaders, travel technology partnerships at Lyft and CLEAR, a B2C role at Staples, and founding Innovation Row at GBTA, giving her a rare cross functional view of where the supply chain breaks down. In conversation with Alex, Caitlin argues that corporate travel was never designed around traveler experience and shouldn't pretend otherwise: its real job is risk mitigation, cost control, and duty of care, and conflating the two leads to tools that fail on both fronts. She explains Amgine's deliberate choice to position as middleware rather than a consumer brand, embedding into existing infrastructure rather than competing with it, and why that requires a team fluent in GDS language from day one. The discussion covers the unsolved attribution problem facing suppliers like rideshare platforms, the industry's persistent blind spot on ground transportation between airport and hotel, why AI is only as reliable as the legacy systems beneath it, and what BCD's strategic investment, secured after four months of proven results, actually signals about where the corporate travel stack is heading.
Click to expand the full episode transcript (7,210 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.