Everything AI in Travel

In this episode of the Everything AI in Travel podcast, I speak with Thomas Bangert, founder of Travecta, about building the connectivity layer he believes multi-day travel has been missing.
Thomas has spent 26 years in travel, including more than a decade at lastminute.com, followed by roles with TripAdvisor and Amadeus, consulting work with companies including Sojern and PerfectStay, and time with Exoticca. Travecta is now his fourth startup.
The idea for Travecta came from trying to build another travel business and discovering a surprisingly fundamental problem:
There was no equivalent of a Hotelbeds, Amadeus or Duffel that they could simply plug into to access multi-day tour inventory.
Huge amounts of fantastic local product still live in PDFs, spreadsheets, emails, WhatsApp conversations — or simply inside the heads of local DMCs.
Travecta wants to turn all of that into structured, instantly bookable and globally distributable inventory.
We dig into:
🌍 Why so much multi-day tour inventory still isn't bookable online
🔌 How Travecta wants to become the infrastructure connecting local DMCs with OTAs, airlines, cruise lines and other global distributors
🤖 How AI can ingest a PDF or other unstructured tour information and transform it into standardized, distributable inventory
⚡ The challenge of moving traditional DMCs from "on request" bookings to genuine instant confirmation
🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Why Thomas believes human-to-human trust remains critical — even as more of the infrastructure becomes automated
🔗 Why Travecta has been built MCP-native and is preparing for agent-to-agent travel commerce
💬 How future AI agents could potentially do far more than search — negotiating changes to itineraries, duration, inclusions and price
💳 Why the distributor remains merchant of record while Travecta essentially becomes the invisible "rails" connecting both sides
📄 How automated contracting could eliminate the enormous workload involved in hundreds of DMCs individually contracting with hundreds of distributors
🧩 Why personalization doesn't necessarily mean rebuilding an itinerary from scratch — Travecta can offer a "skeleton tour" with optional components layered around it
🏨 Why Thomas believes AI-created dynamic packages and locally crafted DMC tours will coexist, rather than one replacing the other
📦 And the fascinating longer-term opportunity to both bundle and unbundle multi-day tours — potentially allowing distributors to access individual accommodation or experience components from DMC inventory.
Travecta has already begun onboarding DMCs, with hundreds more going through its process, while the distribution side is being prepared for launch.
Thomas also makes a big prediction:
He believes consumer behaviour is heading toward agent-to-agent travel booking, and that within the next couple of years a significant proportion of bookings could happen this way.
If that happens, the companies controlling the structured, queryable and bookable inventory underneath those agents become very interesting indeed.
#AI #TravelAI #TravelTech #AIAgents #MCP #ToursAndActivities #MultiDayTours #DMC #TravelStartups #TourismTechnology #TravelDistribution

In this episode of the Everything AI in Travel podcast, I speak with Vadym Klymov, founder and CEO of WinWin Travel, about using AI to solve one of travel’s surprisingly stubborn problems: personalization.
Vadym comes at the problem from firsthand experience. He spent 12 years in hospitality in Ukraine, growing from renting out his grandparents’ four-room summer house to operating his own 48-room guesthouse and working with a 98-room hotel. He was preparing to develop a 300-room property when the war changed everything and he relocated to the Netherlands.
That eventually led to WinWin Travel.
The premise is simple: Booking.com, Expedia and most hotel websites don't contain enough information to answer the questions that really matter to travellers with specific needs.
We dig into:
🐕 Why travellers with pets can end up calling dozens of hotels just to find somewhere that accepts two large dogs — and determine what it will actually cost
♿ Why accessible travel requires far more detail than an "accessible" checkbox — including bathroom door widths, bed heights, flooring and other specifics
👨‍👩‍👧 Why families, pet owners and travellers with disabilities are WinWin's first three niches — from 38 traveller niches the company has identified
🤖 How WinWin uses AI agents to contact hotels, ask questions, understand free-text responses and turn them into structured, searchable data
📊 Why the company has developed more than 15,000 potential questions for accommodation providers and thousands of corresponding filters
🔄 The surprisingly difficult problem of keeping all that information current — and why simply giving hotels another dashboard to update doesn't work
📧 Why AI-powered email conversations are currently outperforming both forms and AI voice calls for collecting information from busy hotel teams
🔌 How WinWin's MCP strategy could allow other entrepreneurs to build highly specialized travel products on top of its data
🏨 Why WinWin ultimately sees the bigger opportunity as B2B2C infrastructure, rather than simply becoming another niche OTA
🌍 How one LinkedIn post generated hundreds of partnership enquiries from people interested in building niche products using WinWin's MCP
🇦🇪 Why Dubai and the GCC have become a major focus for the company, particularly around accessible tourism
💰 And why Vadym is now actively looking for both niche distribution partners and investors as WinWin expands into the GCC.
One of the most interesting parts of the conversation is how AI changes the interface entirely.
Without AI, extreme personalization could mean confronting travellers with thousands of filters and checkboxes.
With AI, the traveller can simply say:
"I'm travelling to Dubai, I'm a wheelchair user and these are the things I need..."
The AI can translate that natural-language request into the hundreds or thousands of underlying data points required to find accommodation that genuinely fits.
That's a very different version of hotel search — and potentially a much more useful one.
#AI #TravelAI #TravelTech #Hospitality #AccessibleTravel #PetTravel #AIAgents #MCP #HotelTech #TravelStartups #Personalization

In this episode of the Everything AI in Travel podcast, I catch up with Kevin Gautier, CEO and founder of Jinko — almost exactly one year after we first spoke about what he was building.
Kevin is a four-time travel founder whose journey has taken him from video travel reviews and NDC aggregation to a Gen Z flight app that reached #2 in the French App Store, a stint helping build Hopper in Europe, and now Jinko.
And Jinko has evolved significantly.
Originally conceived as a consumer travel app inside ChatGPT, Jinko has pivoted to something potentially much bigger: the travel infrastructure layer for AI agents.
We dig into:
🤖 Why AI agents will need their own travel infrastructure — just as websites and apps needed APIs before them
✈️ How an AI assistant could search and book flights, hotels, trains, experiences and rental cars without becoming a travel company itself
🔌 Why Jinko is protocol-agnostic, supporting MCP, MCP Apps, APIs and CLI integrations
🛒 How agentic travel could shift us from booking individual components to handing an agent an entire trip to fulfil
🎯 Why traveller intent may become one of the most valuable pieces of the travel booking puzzle
🏨 Whether AI could finally give individual hotels and experience operators a better chance of competing directly with OTAs
🤝 The potential for agent-to-agent negotiation — where hotels could compete using breakfast, upgrades, dining credits and other benefits rather than simply price
💳 Why agentic payments remain one of the biggest hurdles — particularly when travellers are being asked to trust an AI agent with a $3,000+ transaction
⚙️ Why API connectivity remains critical even in an AI world
💰 How Jinko makes money through API calls, revenue share and transaction fees
🌍 And why Kevin expects travel distribution to explode into entirely new places as more non-travel companies begin embedding travel into their products.
One of Kevin's most interesting observations comes from the actual prompts Jinko sees: people aren't naturally asking AI to buy an isolated hotel or flight. They're asking it to plan the trip.
That seemingly small difference could have enormous consequences for OTAs, suppliers and the entire structure of travel distribution.
We also get into the question I find particularly fascinating: Who wins when your AI agent becomes the travel buyer?
#AI #TravelAI #AgenticAI #TravelTech #AIAgents #MCP #TravelDistribution #AgenticCommerce #TravelStartups #Jinko

In this episode of the **Everything AI in Travel podcast**, I speak with Faisal Murtaza, founder of Sarucci, about how AI is changing one of the most data-heavy — and commercially important — functions inside a hotel.

Faisal has worked across hotel operations, revenue management and distribution since 2011, managing everything from boutique properties to portfolios of 11 hotels and 3,000 rooms. Now he’s turning that experience into AI-powered revenue intelligence tools.

We dig into:
🏨 What a hotel revenue manager actually does — and why Faisal describes the role as the “air traffic controller” of the commercial operation

📊 Why so many independent hotels are still managing pricing and revenue through spreadsheets, gut feel and disconnected systems

🤖 How AI can identify revenue opportunities and leakage — then recommend the actions a hotel should take

💰 Automated pricing vs keeping a human in the loop

🧠 Why Faisal believes revenue managers should spend less time cleaning and assembling data and more time on strategy

🔗 How AI agents could connect the different parts of a hotel’s commercial operation

⚠️ The risks of simply uploading sensitive hotel and guest data into general-purpose AI tools

🔎 Why hotels need to start thinking about whether their websites and content are actually readable and discoverable by AI agents

🤝 What agent-to-agent commerce could mean for the long-running battle between direct hotel bookings and OTAs

🏨 And why independent hotels may have an interesting opportunity in an agentic world — where they can potentially compete with more than just price.

One particularly interesting idea from Faisal: hotels may be entering a period where **AI discoverability becomes as commercially important as traditional search discoverability**. If an AI agent is choosing where a traveller stays, hotels need to make sure the agent can actually understand, discover and recommend them.

We also discuss Sarucci, Faisal’s revenue intelligence and strategy platform, his AI-readiness auditing tools for hotels, and his upcoming appearance as a finalist at the Future Travel Summit startup competition.

A fascinating conversation about what happens when **AI + hotel data + revenue management + agentic commerce** start converging.

#AI #TravelAI #HotelTech #Hospitality #RevenueManagement #TravelTech #ArtificialIntelligence

What can a tour operator actually do with AI right now — not in five years, not in theory, but today?
In this episode of the Everything AI in Travel Podcast, I sit down with Oliver Green, founder of Tourstack and former co-founder of Carpe Diem Tours, to get extremely practical about what AI can already do inside a tours and activities business.
Ollie isn't just talking about AI. He's building with it — connecting Claude and AI agents to booking systems, websites, Slack, Google Sheets and other parts of the tour operator tech stack.
We work our way through some of the things he believes operators should be doing today, including:
 Build a company brain — give AI context around your products, pricing, meeting points, guides, costs and business knowledge.
 Connect your systems — bring together booking data, calendars, Google Sheets, marketing data and other tools so AI can actually work with your business.
 Turn spreadsheets into dashboards — combine marketing, social, promo-code and sales data and let AI surface the trends rather than manually trawling through sheets.
 Build an AI revenue-management capability — Ollie explains how he's connected booking availability and business economics so an AI agent can identify underperforming departures and recommend pricing changes.
 Plug AI into Slack — allowing teams to ask questions of company data and enabling agents to proactively flag things that need attention.
 Audit — and fix — your website for SEO and AI discovery — using AI to identify technical problems, structured-data opportunities, missing content and other improvements, then potentially implement them.
We also dig into one of the big questions facing tour operators as AI-powered search and agentic commerce develop:
Do OTAs have an inherent advantage because their product data is already structured for machines?
Ollie's argument is that independent operators still have an opportunity — but sitting around waiting isn't the strategy. Websites, structured data, reviews, FAQs, rich content and product information need to become increasingly machine-readable.
We also talk about security, commercially sensitive data, running AI models locally, controlling API costs and why Ollie thinks someone inside a tourism business should be spending serious time every week experimenting with this technology.
If you run a tour, activity, attraction or experience business, this is one of those episodes where you'll probably want Claude or ChatGPT open in another window while you're listening.
And we only made it through five of Ollie's ten ideas — so there may need to be a Part Two.
Subscribe for more conversations with the founders, operators and builders working at the intersection of AI and travel.
#TravelAI #AI #TravelTech #ToursAndActivities #Tourism #TourOperator #ClaudeAI #AgenticAI #TravelMarketing #SEO #AEO #ArtificialIntelligence #EverythingAIInTravel