7 Travel Tech Trends Worth Knowing in 2026 + 3 Emerging Hot Spots to Spend Quality Time with Matt Gray

2026-06-23

Download

Matt Gray is the founder and CEO of Pangea, a free social travel app built to help people coordinate travel plans, share recommendations, and connect with their network around the world. After a decade in product development and corporate M&A at a global fintech company, he left the corporate world in 2023 to become a full-time digital nomad and build Pangea full-time. He is on a personal mission to visit every country in the world. In this episode, we get into seven travel tech trends shaping how people plan, book, and experience...

In this episode, we get into seven travel tech trends shaping how people plan, book, and experience travel, including why most travel apps fail, the rise of social travel, and what AI can and can't do for travelers right now. We also dig into destination recommendations, advice for running a remote business on the road, and what it means to bridge the nomad bubble.

These are genuinely fascinating times to be a traveler and a builder in the travel space, and Matt sits at the center of both worlds. He's thinking seriously about why travel tech has such a high failure rate, and what it would actually take to crack the code, and he brings a perspective that is grounded in years of on-the-ground experience across dozens of countries and travel styles. There is a real conversation here about the gap between wanting to travel and actually doing it, and I think it will stick with you. The travel tech trends for digital nomads piece is insightful, but the human thread running through it all is what makes this one worth your time.

Have you ever had a piece of technology genuinely change how you travel or connect with people on the road? I'd love to hear your thoughts, and I hope you'll share by sending me an audio message.

Tune In To Learn:

Why so many travel apps are built to solve a single problem, and why that almost always leads to failure
How being a "multifaceted traveler" is reshaping what a useful travel platform actually needs to do
Why AI wrappers on ChatGPT are not the same as AI-powered travel tools, and how to tell the difference
How social travel is changing the reason people book trips in the first place
Why off-the-beaten-path destinations benefit most from the rise of connected travel communities
How to break out of the nomad bubble and go deeper in the places you visit
Why the people you travel with may matter more than the places you go
Destination recommendations for regions quietly gaining traction in the nomad world
Advice for running a remote team while living a location-independent life
What it looks like to bring urgency to travel, not just talk about it
And so much more

Resources:

Sign up for our FREE newsletter
Download the Pangea app
Pangea on Instagram
Couchsurfing
Workaway

Want More?

From Expat to Digital Nomad: Finding Your Travel Rhythm, Balancing Burnout, and the Digital Nomad Lifestyle with Kristin Wilson
The World's Most Traveled Person on the Ethics of Gamifying Travel, Best Regions in the World, and Why To Keep Traveling With Harry Mitsidis of NomadMania
Top 5 Reasons For "Slomading" + The Benefits Of Boredom With Tim Marting From Citizen Remote

Thanks To Our Sponsors