Event Spotlight: Aviation Festival Americas 2026
We were invited back to Miami for our second year as the Official Podcast Partner of Aviation Festival Americas and this one is special: it's our largest Event Spotlight episode to date, featuring 20+ interviews and over 5 hours of conversations with the incredible speakers, industry leaders and key attendees that came together to discuss the latest trends shaping aviation and airports.
Our host Dan Christian was joined by his son Oliver, who is currently training to become a pilot and was mentioned several times on last year's episode. He had the chance to meet many of those amazing people and some of the most influential leaders in the airline industry while helping manage the recording schedule. A huge thank you to him and everyone who joined us at the booth and made this episode possible.
Across these conversations, you'll get a remarkably complete picture of where the industry is headed. We start off with how global alliances are rethinking the digital experience so travelers can move seamlessly across carriers and why modern airline retailing and NDC are finally reshaping how flights are sold and distributed. You'll hear how airlines are navigating fleet capacity, fuel price pressure, alongside a candid look at what it takes to grow a premium transatlantic brand in the Americas. Our guests also discuss the parts of the journey that still break down in real life - baggage, disruption, interline connections, and multimodal ground links and they share the innovations designed to fix them, from off-airport bag check to AI-powered door-to-door itineraries.
Accessibility emerges as one of the strongest themes of the episode, with leaders explaining why inclusive design at kiosks, websites, and airports isn't just the right thing to do, it's a massive underserved market. And throughout, founders and operators share what they're seeing on the front lines of agentic AI: conversational interfaces and AI concierges, trust and guardrails, the science of passenger wellbeing like jet lag management, sustainability and emissions tracking, and the coming moment when travelers finally let AI handle bookings end to end.
Whether you're an airline executive, a travel tech founder, an investor, or simply trying to understand where the opportunities lie in the next chapter of aviation, these conversations offer a clear signal through the noise: the winners will be the teams who modernize legacy systems, earn traveler trust, and remove friction without losing the human touch.
With so many valuable insights packed into one episode, we've time-stamped every conversation below so you can jump straight to the people and topics you want to hear most.
Highlights & Timestamps
0m54s – Guido van Til, Vice President, Digital, oneworld
20m0s – Mickey Beyer-Clausen, Co-Founder & CEO, Timeshifter
37m23s – Tedd Evers, Global Partner Leader, Travel & Hospitality, AWS
52m15s – Roberto Held, Head of Business Development – Americas, Avion Express
1hr11m39s – David Hodges, Vice President, Americas, Virgin Atlantic
1hr27m49s – Emilie Gazeau, CEO & Founder, alltheway
1hr49m39s – Dr. Yvette Pegues, Co-Founder & CEO, Your Invisible Disability Group (Accessibility Leader)
2hr11m5s – Ryan Jones, SVP, Global Accessibility Strategy and Advocacy, Vispero
2hr35m38s – Christopher Brown, CEO & Founder, Bonafide
2hr55m9s – Samar Khan, Founder & Chief Sustainability Officer, TripAI Technologies
3hr5m56s – Matthew Wade, Co-Founder, Toggle Travel
3hr21m34s – Charles Studt, CMO, delight.ai
3hr42m24s – Chris Russo, Associate Director, Publicis Sapient
4hr1m53s – Judy McMurtry, Founder and CEO, JM Excel Consultant LLC
4hr14m8s – Chloe Dyett, T7 International Group
4hr31m56s – Oscar Mejia, Sales Director, North America, JR Technologies
4hr44m55s – Kaleb Neal, Transportation Systems Analyst, AeroLink Systems & Gregg Langston, CTO, AeroLink Systems
4hr57m44s – David Pfister, Strategic Alliances Manager, ZS and Judy Pitchford, Worldwide Head of Travel, AWS Travel and Hospitality
