Everything AI in Travel

In this episode of the **Everything AI in Travel podcast**, I speak with **Emmanuel Annor, co-founder and CTO of Equera.ai**, about using AI to connect some of tourism's smallest and least-digitised businesses to the global travel ecosystem.
Emmanuel brings an interesting background to the problem. Before Equera, he built fintech and agritech products used by more than **70,000 farmers across Africa and Asia**, learning how to design technology for remote environments, unreliable connectivity and low-end devices. :chatgpt-content-reference{index="0"}
Now he's applying those lessons to travel.
The problem Equera is tackling is deceptively simple:
**AI can't sell what it can't see.**
Some of the most authentic community-based tourism experiences in the world aren't sitting inside reservation systems or OTA databases. They're being managed through **WhatsApp, pieces of paper, phone calls and conversations**.
So rather than trying to force these businesses into another extranet, Equera is building technology around the tools they already use.
We dig into:
🌍 Why community-based tourism is both economically important and home to some of travel's most memorable experiences
📱 Why Equera abandoned the assumption that suppliers should simply learn to use a portal
📝 The operator who wrote their coffee-tour itinerary **on a piece of paper, photographed it and sent it through WhatsApp** — and how that helped reshape Equera's approach :chatgpt-content-reference{index="1"}
🤖 How AI could turn a WhatsApp message, photograph or even a **voice note in a local dialect** into structured, bookable travel inventory
🔌 Equera's ambition to become an infrastructure layer connecting fragmented offline experiences with OTAs, AI agents and the wider digital travel ecosystem
📅 Why digitisation needs to go beyond simply listing an experience — suppliers also need capabilities such as live availability
🔎 How Equera's status as a **Google Things to Do connectivity partner** can make previously offline community experiences discoverable and bookable through Google :chatgpt-content-reference{index="2"}
📸 The challenge of collecting the photography, video and storytelling required to merchandise these experiences properly
❤️ How that content could also communicate the wider social and economic impact tourism is creating inside communities
🧠 Why Equera is benchmarking different AI models rather than automatically assuming the biggest and most powerful model is the best tool for every job
🤝 And how an emerging world of AI agents and agent-to-agent commerce could create entirely new distribution opportunities for these businesses.
There is a bigger issue here that I think is going to become increasingly important.
As travellers shift from Google searches and OTA filters toward simply asking an AI **"What should I do?"**, we risk creating a new digital divide.
The large, structured and already-digitised tourism businesses are easy for AI to find.
The woman running a cooking experience in her village, the family offering a homestay, or the local guide organising experiences through WhatsApp may effectively be **invisible**.
As Emmanuel puts it, if we're increasingly depending on AI for travel discovery and booking, we need to make sure the businesses that aren't currently represented in the data don't get left behind. :chatgpt-content-reference{index="3"}
That's what makes Equera particularly interesting.
It's not simply using AI to make an existing digital travel business more efficient.
**It's using AI to help bring an entirely offline layer of tourism into the digital economy.**
And potentially giving AI agents access to some of the best stuff in travel in the process.
#TravelAI #AI #CommunityBasedTourism #TravelTech #AIAgents #Tourism #Experiences #SustainableTourism #TravelStartups #Africa #Equera

In this episode of the Everything AI in Travel podcast, I speak with Amit Shamni, founder of Bridgify, about building a technology layer for one of travel’s most fragmented categories — tours, activities and experiences — and the journey that ultimately led to Bridgify being acquired by HBX Group.

Amit started with a simple observation: booking flights and hotels online was easy, but finding and booking everything you actually do once you arrive was still incredibly fragmented.

Bridgify set out to fix that.

Today, its technology aggregates and normalizes an enormous range of experiences — from concerts and museums to safaris, scuba diving and tours — and makes that inventory available to businesses such as airlines, OTAs, hotels, credit-card companies and loyalty programs through APIs and white-label solutions.

We dig into:
🚀 How Amit tested the original idea with an app that cost just $1,150 to build
🍕 Why he used pizza, beer and traveller interviews to validate the concept before properly building the company
💰 Why Bridgify deliberately chose B2B2C rather than fighting for consumers directly
🌎 Why the company prioritized global coverage first and margin second
⏳ Why it took around 18 months to make the first dollar — and around three years before transactional revenue really started gaining momentum Pasted text
🧱 How years spent aggregating, cleaning, tagging and normalizing wildly different experience inventory created a significant technology and data moat
🎟️ Why a Taylor Swift concert, Dubai desert safari and Australian scuba dive can require completely different booking architecture
🛒 How Bridgify can potentially put products from multiple suppliers into one cart and one transaction — more like the GDS model created for airlines Pasted text
💳 How Bridgify works with loyalty programs, credit cards and membership businesses to use experiences as both a revenue stream and customer perk
🏨 Why HBX Group became such a natural strategic home for Bridgify — combining Bridgify's development speed and experiences infrastructure with HBX's enormous B2B distribution network
🤝 What the acquisition process looked like and why HBX had actually appeared in Bridgify's potential exit strategy years earlier

And then we get into where things become really interesting: AI and agentic commerce.

Amit believes AI is rapidly destroying some of the traditional technology barriers in travel. Small development teams can now build products that once required enormous engineering organizations.

Bridgify has developed what it calls its Travel Operating System (TOS), incorporating tools including an integration factory, website builder and marketing management system — infrastructure designed to dramatically increase the speed at which new travel products can be built and deployed.

We also discuss what happens when travel moves from humans searching websites to agents transacting with agents.

Bridgify is technically preparing for that world — including MCP connectivity — although Amit believes widespread consumer adoption of truly agentic travel commerce is still likely 18–24 months away.

This is a fascinating founder story about spotting a horribly complicated problem, sticking with it through COVID, war and years of startup uncertainty, building infrastructure rather than another consumer travel app — and eventually finding the strategic partner capable of taking it much further.

#TravelAI #AI #TravelTech #AIAgents #AgenticCommerce #ToursAndActivities #Experiences #TravelStartups #HBXGroup #Bridgify #TravelDistribution #MCP

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