The Travel Rockstars Podcast
Interviews with Travel Industry Rockstars. We talk to leading experts across the travel industry about their careers, their experiences, their views on technolgical and market developments. This show gives you the opportunity to get to know the movers and shakers of the travel industry more personally and benefit from the insights they share. So tune in.
All Episodes
Partnerinterview mit Dennis Zimon
Vom Versicherungsaußendienst zum Gründer in der Touristik: Dennis Zimon hat 2017 gemeinsam mit seinem Geschäftspartner Passolution gegründet – mit einer Idee, die aus der Pauschalreiserichtlinie entstand. Heute liefert das Kölner Unternehmen Einreisebestimmungen für alle Nationalitäten in 21 Sprachen, täglich aktualisiert und direkt eingebunden in Midoco und Umbrella. Im Gespräch mit Magnus Kunhardt erzählt Dennis, wie ihm bei seinem ersten Branchenkongress der eigene Stand auf den Kopf fiel, warum ein dynamischer Link mit Push-Benachrichtigung das PDF ablösen sollte und weshalb man KI bei Einreisefragen noch nicht blind vertrauen darf. Außerdem: der Fall Mauritius, das neue Krisenmanagement von Passolution, die technologische Revolution in einer historisch gewachsenen Systemlandschaft – und eine kleine Geschichte aus Paris, die zeigt, wie viel am Reisen hängt.
Travel Rockstar - Bex Deadman
In this episode of Business Travel Rockstars by Midoco, host Magnus Kunhardt talks to Bex Deadman, co-founder of the Travel Risk Academy and former CEO of Blue Cube Travel, about a career that runs from a hotel bar in Farnham to the front line of travel risk management. Bex traces the path: reservations at adventure tour operator Explore, where annual crisis-scenario training was so ingrained that not a single customer was lost across 56 trips during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami; a boutique agency in Brighton where she first met the GDS; Gettabed (now Stuba); and then the "baptism of fire" of corporate travel at HRS, followed by Blue Cube. That combination — deep operational travel knowledge plus a focus on what happens when things go wrong — is what makes her unusual in travel risk today, and what underpins her argument for "holistic" travel risk management: not just high-end security and medical response, but the human work of communication, families and duty of care. She is candid about the industry's technology record, arguing that travel has under-invested for 25 to 30 years and now depends on legacy systems that customers have had to build around. She names three turning points — the internet, the smartphone and, next, agentic AI — all of which handed control to the traveller, and asks how ready travel's commercial models are for a world where an AI agent, not a human, does the buying. On data, she calls travel data the most underused resource a company has, and uses the World War II survivorship-bias story about returning bombers to explain why programmes obsess over TMC data while ignoring the gaps it doesn't cover. She also flags the silo problem — organisations paying for as many as ten traveller-tracking tools they don't know they have — and picks SureSIM, a mobile-network-based location product, as the technology currently exciting her most. The episode closes on her two biggest challenges for the industry: AI, simultaneously the greatest threat and the greatest opportunity, and the industry itself — an unquenchable appetite for travel meeting a climate reality, and an old guard that hasn't yet made room for a generation we should be learning from rather than training. Plus a quick-fire round featuring a forgotten favourite film, a refusal to choose between a dog and a cat, Bob Dylan, and a rockstar claim involving a-ha and a Christmas card.
Travel Rockstar - Martijn van der Voort
In this episode of the Travel Rockstar series, host Magnus Kunhardt talks to travel technology consultant Martijn van der Voort, whose path into the industry started almost by accident — a call centre job at Malev Hungarian Airlines, taken out of financial necessity after moving to Liverpool at 30. From there it was a fast climb through reservations, customer feedback and travel IT at CWT, a route Martijn traces back to jobs as varied as glass cutting and exhibition-stand building. He talks candidly about what keeps him in the industry — the people, and their refusal to let the status quo win — and about the family members and one unlikely music-industry connector who shaped how he thinks about resilience and purpose. The heart of the conversation lands on the pandemic, when he stepped up to lead a five-person team through the industry's toughest stretch, and on his belief that the smartphone, not the GDS, is travel technology's biggest achievement of the millennium. He's outspoken about agentic AI: convinced it will finally break travel's habit of thinking it "owns" the customer, but equally convinced most companies are automating broken processes rather than redesigning them. The episode closes with a lightning round covering Total Recall, a 17,000-record vinyl collection, a retirement plan in Luxor, and a nomination for the next Travel Rockstar: Bex Deadman of the Travel Risk Academy.
Travel Rockstar - Steve Clagg
In this episode of Travel Rockstar, host Magnus Kunhardt talks with Steve Clagg, who spent a decade leading corporate travel technology at Microsoft after an unconventional path through academia, software security, and Office 365 platform engineering. Steve traces how a personal observation — that travel wasn't represented as a data object in the Microsoft Graph — set him on a career-long hunt for gaps in the industry's technology stack. The conversation moves from the entrenched conservatism of GDS-era business models through to the two developments Steve considers the biggest achievements in travel tech since 2000: the shift from paper to electronic tickets, and the rise of language-model AI built on transformer architecture. Steve makes the case for interoperable, "one app to rule them all" travel experiences over walled-garden platforms, and offers concrete advice for newcomers on becoming technology stewards rather than travel-program operators. The episode closes on a candid discussion of AI's biggest blind spot — what happens when things go wrong — and a lighter quick-fire round covering Blade Runner, Black Sabbath, an elevator encounter with Bill Gates, and an admittedly intergalactic bucket list.