Travel Rockstar - Bex Deadman
The Travel Rockstars Podcast
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.
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