What if the biggest thing holding multi-day tours back isn’t demand — but infrastructure?

<p>In this episode of the Everything AI in Travel podcast, I speak with Thomas Bangert, founder of Travecta, about building the connectivity layer he believes multi-day travel has been missing.<br>Thomas has spent 26 years in travel, including more than a decade at lastminute.com, followed by roles with TripAdvisor and Amadeus, consulting work with companies including Sojern and PerfectStay, and time with Exoticca. Travecta is now his fourth startup.<br>The idea for Travecta came from trying to build another travel business and discovering a surprisingly fundamental problem:<br>There was no equivalent of a Hotelbeds, Amadeus or Duffel that they could simply plug into to access multi-day tour inventory.<br>Huge amounts of fantastic local product still live in PDFs, spreadsheets, emails, WhatsApp conversations — or simply inside the heads of local DMCs.<br>Travecta wants to turn all of that into structured, instantly bookable and globally distributable inventory.<br>We dig into:<br>🌍 Why so much multi-day tour inventory still isn&#39;t bookable online<br>🔌 How Travecta wants to become the infrastructure connecting local DMCs with OTAs, airlines, cruise lines and other global distributors<br>🤖 How AI can ingest a PDF or other unstructured tour information and transform it into standardized, distributable inventory<br>⚡ The challenge of moving traditional DMCs from &quot;on request&quot; bookings to genuine instant confirmation<br>🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Why Thomas believes human-to-human trust remains critical — even as more of the infrastructure becomes automated<br>🔗 Why Travecta has been built MCP-native and is preparing for agent-to-agent travel commerce<br>💬 How future AI agents could potentially do far more than search — negotiating changes to itineraries, duration, inclusions and price<br>💳 Why the distributor remains merchant of record while Travecta essentially becomes the invisible &quot;rails&quot; connecting both sides<br>📄 How automated contracting could eliminate the enormous workload involved in hundreds of DMCs individually contracting with hundreds of distributors<br>🧩 Why personalization doesn&#39;t necessarily mean rebuilding an itinerary from scratch — Travecta can offer a &quot;skeleton tour&quot; with optional components layered around it<br>🏨 Why Thomas believes AI-created dynamic packages and locally crafted DMC tours will coexist, rather than one replacing the other<br>📦 And the fascinating longer-term opportunity to both bundle and unbund