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 series
Guest 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.
What is Travel Tech Podcast?
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.