Europe Incoming CEO Uma Somia and COO Dylan Lall sit down with Puneet Dahiya of Trexova, who brings 26 years of experience across the global travel industry and is now focused on the fast-growing world of wellness travel.

Rather than getting caught up in the big growth figures around wellness tourism, the conversation looks at what’s actually happening behind them: a fragmented market, more informed travellers, the importance of trust, and the challenge of matching people with an experience that genuinely fits what they need.

Puneet explains why wellness travel works differently from a traditional holiday. The starting point often isn’t “Where do I want to go?” but “What do I want to feel, improve or change?” The destination comes afterwards.

That shift makes personalisation even more important, and raises a familiar question for The Travel Disruptor: how much of this can AI realistically handle?

Uma, Dylan and Puneet discuss where technology can help with discovery, research and matching, and where human judgement, understanding and trust still make the difference in such a personal kind of travel.

Links and Resources:

• Europe Incoming: One Partner For UK and Europe
• Dylan Lall LinkedIn
• Uma Somia LinkedIn
• Puneet Dahiya LinkedIn
• Trexova

Subscribe to the show and share it with two other travel lovers. We’re here for the long haul. ✈️

YOU need to be here if you travel, sell travel, provide travel services, or just have an interest in the stories, successes, failures, progress, and stagnation of the travel industry.

We are here to shake things up. If you are a Travel Disruptor yourself, and want to be a guest on the show, email marketing@europeincoming.com

Europe Incoming is your #1 DMC for multi-country programmes, fast quoting, and calm delivery. Built for operators, agents, and planners who need things to run smoothly.

Who We Are:
The Travel Disruptor is brought to you by Europe Incoming, a destination management partner for travel professionals selling the UK and Europe.

One DMC. All of Europe! Celebrating 40+ years of tailor-made European Travel.

For more than 40 years, we’ve helped tour operators, travel agents, and organisers build programmes that are easy to sell and even easier to deliver.
From hotel contracting and transport coordination to guides, entrances, dining, and on-the-ground support, we handle the moving parts so your guests feel the difference and your team stays in control.

If you want to feature on the show as a guest or as a sponsor, email marketing@europeincoming.com today to get the conversation started.

Europe Incoming CEO Uma Somia and COO Dylan Lall sit down with David Boigne, travel industry veteran and founder of 5Continents, to talk about what AI is changing in travel and, perhaps more importantly, what it isn’t.

David’s career has taken him from working as a tour guide in France to building a global travel business, giving him a front-row seat to decades of change in the industry. His view on AI is pragmatic: the future isn’t about technology replacing travel professionals, but about good travel professionals learning how to use it well.

That leads to a bigger question. When travellers can research destinations, compare options and generate entire itineraries online in seconds, what are they actually paying a human expert for?

The conversation moves through AI-generated itineraries, travel agents, luxury travel, customer service and the importance of having someone accountable when things don’t go to plan. Technology can make information easier to find and planning much faster, but David argues that knowledge, judgement, empathy and trust are still what turn a trip on paper into a genuinely great travel experience.

And as AI makes information increasingly easy to access, those human qualities may become more valuable, not less.

Links and Resources:
• Europe Incoming: One Partner For UK and Europe
• Dylan Lall LinkedIn
• Uma Somia LinkedIn
• David Boigne LinkedIn
• 5Continents

Subscribe to the show and share it with two other travel lovers. We’re here for the long haul. ✈️

YOU need to be here if you travel, sell travel, provide travel services, or just have an interest in the stories, successes, failures, progress, and stagnation of the travel industry.

We are here to shake things up. If you are a Travel Disruptor yourself, and want to be a guest on the show, email marketing@europeincoming.com

Europe Incoming is your #1 DMC for multi-country programmes, fast quoting, and calm delivery. Built for operators, agents, and planners who need things to run smoothly.

Who We Are:
The Travel Disruptor is brought to you by Europe Incoming, a destination management partner for travel professionals selling the UK and Europe.

One DMC. All of Europe! Celebrating 40+ years of tailor-made European Travel.

For more than 40 years, we’ve helped tour operators, travel agents, and organisers build programmes that are easy to sell and even easier to deliver.
From hotel contracting and transport coordination to guides, entrances, dining, and on-the-ground support, we handle the moving parts so your guests feel the difference and your team stays in control.

If you want to feature on the show as a guest or as a sponsor, email marketing@europeincoming.com today to get the conversation started.

Europe Incoming COO Dylan Lall looks at a side of travel planning that doesn’t always make it into the glossy itineraries: knowing where not to go, what to watch out for and how good local knowledge can keep travellers out of trouble.

From security advice and safer routing to real-time alerts, Dylan explores how AI could help travel companies spot risks earlier and communicate them faster. Rather than waiting for something to go wrong and then fixing it, could technology help DMCs prevent some of those problems in the first place?

The conversation also turns to what good service actually looks like. Drawing on very different hospitality experiences in Paris and at Belmond Hotel Caruso in Italy, Dylan talks about the small moments that make people feel genuinely looked after, and why great service is about far more than simply delivering what was booked.

AI may become very good at anticipating needs, sharing information and helping teams respond faster. But warmth, attention, empathy and the feeling that somebody is genuinely listening? Dylan isn’t convinced we’ll be automating those quite so easily.

Links and Resources:

• Europe Incoming: One Partner For UK and Europe

• Dylan Lall LinkedIn

Subscribe to the show and share it with two other travel lovers. We’re here for the long haul. ✈️

YOU need to be here if you travel, sell travel, provide travel services, or just have an interest in the stories, successes, failures, progress, and stagnation of the travel industry.

We are here to shake things up. If you are a Travel Disruptor yourself, and want to be a guest on the show, email marketing@europeincoming.com

Europe Incoming is your #1 DMC for multi-country programmes, fast quoting, and calm delivery. Built for operators, agents, and planners who need things to run smoothly.

Who We Are:
The Travel Disruptor is brought to you by Europe Incoming, a destination management partner for travel professionals selling the UK and Europe.

One DMC. All of Europe! Celebrating 40+ years of tailor-made European Travel.

For more than 40 years, we’ve helped tour operators, travel agents, and organisers build programmes that are easy to sell and even easier to deliver.
From hotel contracting and transport coordination to guides, entrances, dining, and on-the-ground support, we handle the moving parts so your guests feel the difference and your team stays in control.

If you want to feature on the show as a guest or as a sponsor, email marketing@europeincoming.com today to get the conversation started.

Europe Incoming COO Dylan Lall and CSO Staffan Nilsson take on one of the biggest questions facing travel right now: is AI genuinely going to disrupt the industry, or are we getting carried away by the hype?

Drawing on Staffan’s 30 years across travel and travel tech, they explore where AI can genuinely make a difference and where the fundamentals haven’t changed. Trust, relationships, operational experience and having a real person there when something goes wrong still matter, particularly for complex itineraries, group travel and high-value holidays.

The conversation moves from trusting AI-generated answers and the need to verify what we’re told, to concierge-style service, personalisation, 24/7 support and why empathy matters most when a trip starts to unravel. They also look at how AI could lower barriers to entry, speed up research and sales, and make expertise more accessible, while established travel businesses retain an advantage that’s much harder to manufacture: years of experience actually delivering trips in the real world.

And, naturally, there’s some debate about whether AI is making us smarter, simply making us look smarter, or occasionally just helping us confirm whatever we already wanted to believe.

Links and Resources:

• Europe Incoming: One Partner For UK and Europe

• Dylan Lall LinkedIn

• Staffan Nilsson LinkedIn

Subscribe to the show and share it with two other travel lovers. We’re here for the long haul. ✈️

YOU need to be here if you travel, sell travel, provide travel services, or just have an interest in the stories, successes, failures, progress, and stagnation of the travel industry.

We are here to shake things up. If you are a Travel Disruptor yourself, and want to be a guest on the show, email marketing@europeincoming.com

Who We Are:
The Travel Disruptor is brought to you by Europe Incoming, a destination management partner for travel professionals selling the UK and Europe.

One DMC. All of Europe! Celebrating 40+ years of tailor-made European Travel.

For more than 40 years, we’ve helped tour operators, travel agents, and organisers build programmes that are easy to sell and even easier to deliver.
From hotel contracting and transport coordination to guides, entrances, dining, and on-the-ground support, we handle the moving parts so your guests feel the difference and your team stays in control.

If you want to feature on the show as a guest or as a sponsor, email marketing@europeincoming.com today to get the conversation started.

What the hell is a telex??

Uma Somia is CEO and Dylan Lall is COO at Europe Incoming.

In This Episode:
Uma, a 40-year travel industry veteran, shares how communication and operations evolved from landlines, telex and typewriters to computers, booking programs, email and now AI. Uma explains that early bookings relied heavily on phone calls, personal relationships, carbon-copy records and local knowledge without internet tools like Google. She argues that while technology speeds processing and can handle tedious tasks (e.g., reconfirmations), three essentials remain: trust, destination knowledge/experience, and human reassurance, especially for complex, multi-supplier group travel, student safety, and crisis situations such as COVID cancellations, coach breakdowns, room disputes, flight disruptions, or holding a flight for late groups.

Together, they discuss how online brands can earn trust for simple FIT bookings, but higher-risk problems still drive customers to want familiar human contacts, and Europe Incoming is adopting AI to free staff to focus on customer care and service quality.

Who We Are:
The Travel Disruptor is brought to you by Europe Incoming, a destination management partner for travel professionals selling the UK and Europe.

One DMC. All of Europe! Celebrating 40+ years of tailor-made European Travel.

For more than 40 years, we’ve helped tour operators, travel agents, and organisers build programmes that are easy to sell and even easier to deliver.
From hotel contracting and transport coordination to guides, entrances, dining, and on-the-ground support, we handle the moving parts so your guests feel the difference and your team stays in control.

If you want to feature on the show as a guest or as a sponsor, email marketing@europeincoming.com today to get the conversation started.

This is where it all begins! The Travel Disruptor Podcast is about the big changes happening across travel, business and technology, and what they actually mean for the people living through them. From AI and automation to leadership, customer expectations and human connection, each episode brings together honest conversations, different viewpoints and questions worth arguing about.

Who We Are:
The Travel Disruptor is brought to you by Europe Incoming, a destination management partner for travel professionals selling the UK and Europe.

One DMC. All of Europe! Celebrating 40+ years of tailor-made European Travel.

For more than 40 years, we’ve helped tour operators, travel agents, and organisers build programmes that are easy to sell and even easier to deliver.
From hotel contracting and transport coordination to guides, entrances, dining, and on-the-ground support, we handle the moving parts so your guests feel the difference and your team stays in control.

If you want to feature on the show as a guest or as a sponsor, email marketing@europeincoming.com today to get the conversation started.