Travel Tech Podcast

Alex Brooker

The Travel Tech Podcast, hosted by Alex Brooker, 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. Alex Brooker is an industry veteran with experience in aviation, start up to exit, and AI transformation.

  1. 6d ago

    ChatGPT Said the Visa Would Be Accepted. It Wasn't.

    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still give inconsistent, sometimes incorrect answers about visa requirements because the underlying web content is outdated or contradictory.Internal AI use: Swift uses AI extensively to scrape government and consulate websites and build a requirements database, with human review as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 problemGuest 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

  2. Sep 8

    The Deal AI Can Never Find

    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 aviationWhere 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

  3. Sep 1

    Above China, Your Starlink Doesn't Exist

    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 nextClosing thoughts: the upcoming Forthcode aviation AI report and what's nextGuest 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.

  4. Aug 26

    Why Can't I Just Book My Own Trip? Dual Identity, Dreadful Booking Tools and the Real Job of Corporate Travel

    Why can't you just book your own work trip? You can. You just won't get reimbursed. Corporate travel exists to manage risk, cost and duty of care, and the tools built to enforce that have spent years treating the traveler as a problem to be contained rather than a person who books flights every week in their own life. Caitlin Gomez, Head of Growth at Amgine, joins Alex to unpack the dual identity at the heart of corporate travel: the same person is a consumer on their phone and a business traveler in the program, and almost nothing in the supply chain connects the two. They cover why the booking tools travelers have suffered through were never designed for them, how suppliers should think about attribution when a traveler shows up under a personal account, why Amgine positions itself as middleware that plugs into existing GDS and TMC infrastructure rather than replacing it, and why AI in corporate travel is only as useful as the antiquated systems it has to talk to. The conversation also takes in Amgine's omnichannel booking flow, the industry's blind spot on ground transportation, and what the recent strategic investment from BCD actually signals about the partnership. What You'll Learn Traveler experience vs. program design: Corporate travel isn't optimized for consumer grade experience because its real job is risk mitigation, cost control, and getting people home safely, not replicating a consumer app.Middleware positioning: Amgine deliberately avoids becoming a consumer brand, choosing instead to integrate into existing TMC and GDS infrastructure rather than compete with it.Fit over features: Flashy travel technology often fails in production because buyers select tools the way people furnish an apartment without measuring the room, and the tool doesn't actually fit the program.Attribution is unsolved: Consumer platforms like rideshare apps have no reliable way to tie a traveler's personal account back to their corporate persona, which limits how partners can prove value to a CFO.Ground transport is the visibility gap: Travel programs track travelers well in the air and at check in but lose visibility the moment someone is in a car between the airport and the hotel.AI is bounded by data quality: AI in travel is only as reliable as the legacy GDS and API infrastructure underneath it, and teams that skip fundamentals for AI shortcuts get stuck when systems break.Human judgment still leads: AI acts as a force multiplier for agents and engineers who already understand the domain, not a substitute for the human judgment needed when a trip goes wrong.Partnership over funding: Amgine's BCD investment came after four months of proven results and was framed internally as acceleration on an already fully funded company, not a lifeline.Timestamped Highlights (00:00) Cold open and podcast intro(00:46) Can employees just book their own travel?(02:49) Why corporate travel is layered, not hard(05:12) Where Amgine sits as "middleware" in the travel stack(06:18) Inside the omnichannel workflow: email, chat, Slack, WhatsApp(09:13) Lessons from GBTA and building Innovation Row(11:02) The apartment without measurements analogy(14:22) What suppliers get wrong: attribution and connective tissue(19:12) The ground transport blind spot and duty of care(25:17) Walking through the WhatsApp booking flow(32:43) Why AI is only as good as the data behind it(38:53) Personal vs. business travel risk tolerance(42:09) The BCD investment and what it actually signals(44:40) Amgine's agnostic positioning and where to find the teamGuest bio Caitlin Gomez is Head of Growth at Amgine (amgine.ai), an AI powered middleware platform that automates the manual, time consuming parts of corporate travel booking without replacing existing GDS and TMC infrastructure. Her background spans travel technology partnerships at Lyft and CLEAR, a consumer facing role at Staples, TMC sales at HRG and Travel Leaders, and founding Innovation Row at GBTA. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caitlingomez/ 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 in regulated environments. Before founding Airside Labs, he built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety critical domains and now invests in early stage technology ventures.

  5. Aug 18

    89% of Airline Carts Never Convert

    Airline checkout loses close to 9 out of 10 shoppers before they ever pay, and Kameron Bertine's fix isn't a redesign — it's an identity layer airlines were never built to have. Kameron Bertine is co-founder and CEO of Movmo, a startup building an identity and checkout layer for airlines and hotels modeled on Shopify's ShopPay. The conversation covers the origin of the problem in Kameron's own booking experience, why airline cart abandonment runs as high as 89%, how Movmo integrates with legacy PSS and NDC infrastructure without replacing it, and why Movmo is deliberately holding off on fully agentic booking despite having the technical capability today. What You'll Learn Cart abandonment: Airline booking abandonment runs around 89%, higher than e-commerce's roughly 70-79% and close to ferry bookings at the top of the range.Design pattern: Movmo is modeled directly on Shopify ShopPay and payment layers like Stripe Link and Klarna rather than inventing a new checkout behavior from scratch.Merchant of record: Airlines care most about retaining the merchant-of-record relationship, so Movmo is built as an identity and checkout layer that sits on top of existing systems rather than replacing them.Legacy infrastructure: Movmo is designed to work with whatever PSS, GDS, or NDC infrastructure an airline already runs, since rip-and-replace projects in this industry routinely stall for years.Agentic readiness: Movmo could technically ship agentic booking today, but is deliberately sequencing a two-to-three year rollout through express checkout and white-label products first to build traveler trust before letting AI agents transact directly.Sales reality: Enterprise airline sales cycles typically run 12 to 24 months, sometimes up to 36, which reframes a two-month first proposal as unusually fast progress.Industry priorities: Agentic or AI-driven booking reportedly sits under 5% on airline executives' list of priorities, well behind operations and other concerns.Conversion signal: ShopPay profiles reportedly convert roughly 50% better than guest checkout, a gap Movmo is betting will show up similarly in airline booking once identity persists across sessions. Time-Stamped Highlights (00:00) Cold open and episode introduction(02:05) The Ecuador-to-Spain booking that started it all(03:14) The ShopPay moment: the light bulb for Movmo(07:57) 89% cart abandonment and why it happens(11:01) What Movmo's early user research actually found(14:17) Inside the express checkout flow, explained(15:39) Designing the one-click booking experience(17:18) The escalator sales funnel at FTE/APEX Long Beach(21:52) Legacy rails: working with NDC, GDS, and PSS instead of replacing them(23:50) Layla, Gemini, and where agentic booking is really headed(31:18) Merchant of record, loyalty, and airline governance requirements(33:16) The commercial model and transaction-fee approach(36:58) Why Movmo won't launch full agentic booking yet(39:17) Biggest surprises: sales cycle length and a 35 NPS awardGuest bio Kameron Bertine is co-founder and CEO of Movmo, an identity and checkout layer for airlines and hotels designed to reduce cart abandonment and enable persistent traveler profiles across booking sessions. He came from a product design background with prior experience in ERP systems, and founded Movmo in June 2024 after his own frustrating international booking experience. Company: movmo.io | LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kameron-bertine 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, helping organizations build and test AI agents in regulated environments. Before founding Airside Labs, he built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety-critical domains, and he also invests in early-stage technology ventures.

  6. Aug 12

    The Feedback You Don't Notice You're Getting

    Alex Brooker hands his own microphone to the two people who know him best and lets them ask the questions he never answers on his own show. Adrian McKenzie and Oli Deakin, Alex Brooker's former colleagues at Snowflake Software, take over hosting duties on the Travel Tech Podcast to interview Alex directly. The conversation moves through leadership philosophy, the book Alex is writing about his career before and during Snowflake Software, and the early-life habits, from door-to-door fossil sales to a career defining dressing down, that shaped how each of them works today. What You'll Learn Leadership: Being kind, not nice, means having the uncomfortable conversation instead of avoiding it.Feedback: The best feedback often doesn't register as feedback until you reflect on the conversation afterward.Trust: Giving honest feedback gets harder, not easier, with people you haven't worked with for long.Writing: Alex's book centers on the moment a founder's problems outgrow what one person can code alone.Strategy: Most technology leaders solve what's directly in front of them instead of planning three to five years ahead.Formation: Early hustle, from door-to-door sales to Christmas Day shifts, builds a lasting baseline for how someone works.Resilience: Harsh, accurate feedback early in a career can become the turning point that accelerates it.Risk: Leaving a large corporation trades procedural safety nets for closeness to every decision.Time-Stamped Highlights   (0:00) Introduction: turning the tables on Alex  (2:18) Lessons from moving out of corporate life  (2:50) Be kind, not nice  (8:17) The challenge of giving honest feedback to people you don't know well  (11:14) Alex's book project and its emotional core  (13:47) Ollie's hypothetical book: technology strategy        (15:50) Formative story: Alex's childhood fossil-selling hustle  (19:29) Ollie's turning point: the feedback that changed his career  (24:01) Adrian's formative story: dinner table debates and connecting people  (25:41) Threads between early formation and post-corporate strengths  (26:11) Being closer to the edge: solopreneurship vs. corporate safety  (29:02) Why corporate stability is more illusion than reality  (30:04) What's next: AI, small business leverage, and future chapters  (31:41) Closing thoughts and thanks Guest bios Adrian McKenzie helped transform and build Snowflake Software alongside Alex Brooker and Oli Deakin before moving into leadership and team performance work, built around the principle of being kind rather than nice. Oli Deakin was also part of the leadership team as CTO at Snowflake Software (in its second life) and now advises technology leaders on building longer term technology strategy, helping heads of tech and CTOs connect day to day decisions to a three to five year vision. 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. Before founding Airside Labs, he built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety-critical domains, and he also invests in early-stage technology ventures.

  7. Aug 3

    An Airline Is Just a Software Stack Nobody Finished Building

    PLAY Airlines went from zero to $350 million in revenue in three years, did nearly everything right by its former CEO's account, and still went bankrupt — because in aviation, fuel price doesn't care about your execution. Birgir Jónsson is the former CEO of PLAY Airlines, former deputy CEO of WOW air, former CEO of Iceland Express, and previously led a turnaround at Iceland's postal service. In this conversation he breaks down why aviation resists new talent, why airline technology is far less standardized than outsiders assume, and what actually happened when fuel prices upended PLAY's business model after the invasion of Ukraine. What You'll Learn Closed industry: Aviation is a tight-knit, self-referential community that makes it structurally hard for outside talent to break in and stay.Culture split: Airlines run two cultures at once — crew and office — with different metrics, incentives, and worldviews, which makes company-wide alignment unusually hard.Standardization gap: Selling an airline seat looks like a solved e-commerce problem from the outside, but every new airline has to build its distribution and inventory stack from scratch.Fuel exposure: A single input cost — fuel — can erase the value of near-perfect operational execution within weeks.Hub model risk: PLAY's Iceland-as-a-hub strategy between Europe and the US stopped working once new aircraft types and geopolitical shocks shifted capacity onto direct Atlantic routes.Manager gap: Fast-scaling companies routinely promote technical experts into management roles without training them for the different skillset leadership actually requires.AI reality check: AI's near-term value in aviation is internal — helping new hires and cross-functional teams make sense of complex, fragmented data — more than customer-facing booking automation.Founder takeaway: The durable money in aviation tech has historically gone to companies solving infrastructure problems, not to the airlines themselves. Time-Stamped Highlights  (00:00) Introduction: an airline CEO joins the show for the first time(01:17) Twenty years in and out of Icelandic aviation(02:36) The "outsider's perspective" and why aviation resists new blood(04:19) Crew vs. office: the divided culture inside every airline(08:15) Building PLAY out of WOW air's DNA, during the pandemic(10:56) Why an airline is really an unfinished software stack(14:07) Negotiating distribution deals in a "very old school" industry(18:16) Legacy vs. new: why a five-year-old airline already has legacy debt(19:50) PLAY's bankruptcy and the fuel price that broke the model(21:30) Private equity, EasyJet, and why aviation takes business personally(29:02) Why the Iceland hub strategy stopped working(35:38) Scaling from zero to $350 million: growing pains and manager training(46:57) Where AI actually helps in aviation today(53:46) Closing advice for founders building in travel tech Guest bio Birgir Jónsson is the former CEO of PLAY Airlines, where he led the Icelandic low-cost carrier from launch through rapid growth to roughly $350 million in annual revenue. He previously served as deputy CEO of WOW air, CEO of Iceland Express, and led a turnaround at Iceland's postal service, and has also worked in medical equipment and printing. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/biggijonsson/ 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 in regulated environments. Before founding Airside Labs, he 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/

  8. Jul 28

    Nobody Would Fund a Human for This

    Four founders who have never met each other all built the same tool for the same reason: a phone call that no human team could ever be funded to make. This is the first episode in a new series pulling together ideas that surfaced independently across separate conversations with founders and operators. Host Alex Brooker features Mike Putnam (Custom Travel Solutions / reconfirm.ai), Anne Marie Pellerin (airport operations and security), Yagub Rahimov (call center AI infrastructure), and Fred Bean (Hotel Port), each making the case for AI-driven phone calling from a different corner of the travel and aviation industry. What You'll Learn The reconfirmation gap: Roughly two in every hundred hotel reservations get lost between the booking channel and the property, and the traveler usually finds out at the front desk.Hotel switches and data loss: Distribution tools like travel gateways and hub systems make shopping easier for consumers but create more points where a confirmed booking can quietly disappear.Voice as an audit layer: In airport maintenance operations, AI-driven calls to service engineers can capture and structure information that would otherwise stay fragmented across frontline paper logs, call center software, IT systems, and vendor platforms.The data orchestration bottleneck: Predictive analytics in airport maintenance is blocked less by AI capability and more by the absence of one unified, high-quality data set across all the systems involved.The unit economics case: Processing a single call for transcription and analysis can cost 5 to 10 cents while saving an organization roughly $200 in support time, which is what makes the business case close on its own.Privacy-by-architecture: A gateway approach can anonymize call data before it reaches an LLM, using a single base URL swap rather than a full architectural rebuild.The human off-ramp requirement: Voice AI adoption depends on giving customers a fast, obvious route to a human when they don't want to talk to a machine.Text over voice, long-term: At least one founder in the space expects text and messaging channels to eventually overtake voice as the dominant interface for these interactions. Time-Stamped Highlights  (00:00) Introduction: a new series built from ideas raised independently(00:27) Framing the theme: AI phone calling as the through-line(01:10) The traveler's worst moment: a booking that isn't there at check-in(02:00) Mike Putnam on the hotel switch problem and lost reservations(03:22) Inside reconfirm.ai: how the reconfirmation call actually works(04:24) Why the labor cost alone rules out a human doing this job(04:36) Shifting to aviation: Anne Marie Pellerin on equipment failure at 2am(05:16) The failure engine: building a smarter picture of equipment breakdowns(06:09) The real blocker for predictive analytics: no unified data set(08:17) Yagub Rahimov on a call center processing hundreds of thousands of calls daily(10:05) The gateway approach: anonymizing data with a one-line code change(11:38) The cents-versus-hundreds math behind the ROI(13:00) Fred Bean makes the case against voice: the "are you a human" problem(13:16) Why a human off-ramp is non-negotiable for adoption(13:58) The case for text and messaging overtaking voice long-term(14:06) Closing: four founders, one convergent idea, and what's next in the seriesGuest bios Mike Putnam is the founder of Custom Travel Solutions and built reconfirm.ai, a service that uses AI-driven phone calls to verify hotel bookings directly with properties before guests arrive. Anne Marie Pellerin works in airport operations and security, where she has integrated AI into a failure engine that analyzes equipment breakdowns and automates service-engineer notification calls. Yagub Rahimov works with call center infrastructure at scale, building gateway-based AI systems that anonymize customer data before it reaches a language model for processing. Fred Bean is the founder of Hotel Port and offers a counterpoint on voice AI adoption, arguing that human off-ramps and text-based channels will ultimately matter more than voice alone. 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, helping organizations build and test AI agents in regulated environments. He previously built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety-critical domains, and now invests in early-stage technology ventures while advocating for thoughtful, real-world AI deployment.

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About

The Travel Tech Podcast, hosted by Alex Brooker, 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. Alex Brooker is an industry veteran with experience in aviation, start up to exit, and AI transformation.

Information

  • Creator
    Alex Brooker
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    34
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Alex Brooker
  • Show Website
    Travel Tech Podcast