Travel Rockstar Interview - Gee Mann

  • 39 min

Travel Rockstar - Gee Mann

The Travel Rockstars Podcast

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Gee Mann, Founder at TRAVLRID

Let's start with something about you. How did you start your professional career and how did you get into the travel industry?

Not a very glamorous story, actually. I started as a mechanical engineer in the oil and gas industry. I spent about 15 years designing offshore and onshore platforms for clients like BP and Shell. At the same time, I had a family events business on the side, which I eventually sold successfully.

That’s really where things started shifting for me. I moved into meetings and events, then business travel, and eventually into travel technology. Over the last 15 years I’ve been building hotel distribution systems, working with blockchain, AI and broader travel tech innovation.

So somehow I went from managing offshore engineering projects and massive budgets to becoming a travel technology entrepreneur.

That’s a huge career switch. Do you see similarities between engineering and what you do today? 

Actually, yes — more than people might think.

In engineering, everything is process-driven. Things flow through systems, they get refined, cleaned and moved where they need to go. That’s not very different from what happens with data and AI today.

Even managing remote offshore engineering teams years ago feels surprisingly similar to how distributed technology teams operate now. I was already managing hundreds of people remotely long before “remote work” became fashionable.

A lot of the principles transfer directly: structure, process, systems thinking and problem solving.

Is there something that particularly fascinates you about this industry?

The amount of opportunity.

Every vertical in travel is open to disruption. Every single one. You could spend five lifetimes working in travel and still not get bored because there’s always another problem to solve.

That’s what excites me most — the industry still has enormous room for innovation.

At the same time, change in travel can be very slow. Take NDC for example — it’s been around for years and adoption still takes time. 

That’s true, but you also have to ask the opposite question: what would the industry look like without NDC?

People criticise it a lot, and as a technologist I sometimes think, “we could fix that in a week.” But change at industry scale is always painful.

You have to start somewhere. Without people willing to push those changes forward, nothing evolves.

Who or what has inspired you and/or continues to do so today? 

I’ve always been inspired by people who challenged limitations.

One example is the Wright Brothers. The story fascinates me because they achieved powered flight without the resources others had available at the time. They weren’t supposed to win — but they did.

More recently, I’m inspired by entrepreneurs who completely reshape industries. Uber is a great example. Once upon a time, the idea of ordering a taxi through your phone sounded crazy.

Those moments — where someone rethinks behaviour itself — really inspire me.

What has been your favourite experience during your professional career to date?

Actually, something very personal.

Recently I spent several months in hospital, and that experience completely changed my perspective. Spending time with nurses and healthcare workers every day was incredibly moving.

The level of care they give people goes far beyond their job description. They deal with enormous pressure, difficult environments and emotional strain, yet they continue showing compassion every single day.

If I had to give a shoutout to anyone, it would genuinely be the nurses at Oxford Hospital.

In your opinion, what is the greatest achievement in travel technology since the turn of the millennium?

Transformers.

The transformer architecture is really what enabled modern AI and large language models like ChatGPT. Before that, chatbots were very limited.

Transformers changed the game because models became capable of predicting language patterns at massive scale. That became the foundation for reasoning systems, knowledge retrieval, speech models and everything we see today.

I genuinely believe we are living through an AI revolution comparable to the Industrial Revolution.

Can you explain transformers in simple terms?

At the beginning, large language models essentially learned by predicting the next likely word in a sentence.

So if you write “My name…” the model predicts the next word based on probabilities learned from huge amounts of text.

Transformers made that prediction process dramatically more effective and scalable. From there, models evolved into systems capable of reasoning, retrieval and multimodal understanding.

That’s really where modern AI started.

Do you have a favourite among the technologies that have been developed for the travel industry? 

I’m excited by the idea of “effortless travel.”

Everyone talks about connected trips, but connected trips mainly help suppliers and systems. I want travel to become invisible for the traveller.

You walk into the airport, move through security, board the plane, arrive at the hotel — and you never even reach into your pocket.

That’s the future I find exciting.

That sounds a little bit like Minority Report.

Exactly.

When you watch those science fiction films again today, you realise how many ideas are already becoming reality.

Personalised digital experiences, smart environments, AI-driven interactions — we’re much closer to those worlds than people realise.

What would you recommend to newcomers to the industry in terms of technology?

Honestly, I’d tell them not to focus only on legacy travel systems.

Go study the APIs and technology stacks of the biggest travel companies. Then compare them with industries like banking or fintech.

Do a gap analysis.

Travel still has a very long way to go technologically, and understanding that gap gives you a much better sense of where opportunities exist.

Where do you currently see the biggest and most important challenges in the industry? Do you have any thoughts on how you would tackle them?

Consent and ownership of data.

As AI becomes more integrated into travel, we need far better ways to manage who has access to personal information, why they have access and how long they keep it.

People are constantly giving consent already — during bookings, immigration checks, biometrics, employment onboarding — but most people don’t fully understand where their data goes.

If we really want AI-powered travel experiences to scale, we need to solve the consent problem properly.

Quick-Fire Questions

Who is the next Business Travel Rockstar we should interview?

I nominate Adam Braun Author, Keynote Speaker, Investor and CEO at Clarasight.