Matthew Wade on the Travel Trends Podcast
The conversation ran as part of the show’s Event Spotlight from the festival, taped at the Miami Beach Convention Center on June 3 and 4 and published on July 7. Travel Trends was back for a second year as the festival’s official podcast partner, and by its own count came away with more than twenty interviews and over five hours of conversation from the floor. Matthew’s is one of them.
It was our second year at AFA, and the second year Dan has made room for a company as young as ours. Neither of those things happens by accident, and we don’t take either for granted.
“It’s always super cool to see the technology in the space. It’s something we’re thinking about expanding to in the future — taking what we’ve learned with travel advisors and agencies and expanding to suppliers and airlines.”
Matthew WadeCo-founder, Toggle Travel
Why an aviation show, for an agency company
Toggle is built for travel agencies, and AFA is a room full of airlines, airports, and the technology companies that serve them. On paper that’s a detour. In practice it’s the same problem one layer up: an industry sitting on enormous amounts of operational data, wired into systems that were built to record transactions rather than explain them.
Every conversation we had on that floor rhymed with the ones we have with agency owners. The data exists. It’s been collected faithfully for years. Almost nobody can get to it in a form that answers a question. Hearing that from carriers and airports, in their own vocabulary, is the clearest confirmation we’ve had that what we’re building for agencies isn’t a niche fix — it’s the shape of a problem the whole industry shares.
What we came away with
The through-line at AFA in 2026 was AI, and specifically the unglamorous prerequisite for it. Everyone we spoke with had moved past whether to use AI and on to the part nobody puts on a conference slide: whether the underlying records are clean enough to trust an answer built on them. That is exactly the conversation we have been having with agencies for the last year, and it was striking to hear it echoed by people operating at an entirely different scale.
“We all know that AI is only as good as the data you’ve given it — the data underneath.”
What we’re building next
Flagging bad records isn’t enough. Toggle already surfaces the data-quality issues sitting inside an agency’s database, which at the largest agencies can run to hundreds of thousands of individual flags, and today a person still has to work through them. So we’re building quality control that repairs as well as reports, closing the gap between an issue being found and an issue being fixed.
The part that isn’t on the agenda
AFA’s best feature is that the floor is open. You can walk up to almost anyone. Matthew spent much of it alongside Dan’s son Oliver, a student pilot, catching sessions and working the booths. In between, the two of them met David Neeleman, who has founded five airlines across three countries: Morris Air, WestJet, JetBlue, Azul, and Breeze.
To Dan and the Travel Trends team
Dan has been in our corner since we met at Virtuoso, long before there was much to point to. He is the founder and host of Travel Trends, now in its seventh season and the #1 B2B travel podcast globally. He has spent that credibility introducing people who are just getting started. We’re so grateful for all the introductions and connections he’s made for us, and grateful to everyone who stopped to talk with us on the floor in Miami Beach.
“I’m a big believer in what he’s been building and the team that he’s surrounded himself with.”
Dan ChristianFounder & host, Travel Trends Podcast
