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

Zero To Travel Podcast

Jason Moore

Places & Travel, Entrepreneurship, Business, Society & Culture

4.6 • 868 Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2026

⏱️ 78 minutes

🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS

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Summary

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 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 Become a Fora Advisor today at foratravel.com/zerototravel Check out Morning Brew Daily for business news that's actually fun. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, I'm Travis Hoym, one of the hosts of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. Each weekday
0:06.7	on Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, we talk through the business news you need to know, and the
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0:20.7	understand them.
0:22.1	Tune in for insights and a long-term perspective on investing and, of course, stock ideas, plenty of
0:27.2	them. To quote a listener, it pays to listen. Check us out and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
0:34.7	A lot of people need a reason to travel. So everyone will say, one day I want to do this, one day I want to do that.
0:40.8	You know, there's kind of a gap between our desire to travel, like human demand of, oh, I really want to travel to all these places.
0:47.1	And then the amount we actually do.
0:48.8	And I think urgency is the issue.
0:51.4	That is today's guest, Matt Gray, who I met through Janessa, who actually
0:56.2	works for this show. And she said, Jason, he's doing some incredible work in this travel tech
1:01.5	space, uniting this nomad community, finding ways to connect digital nomads, remote professionals,
1:08.5	solo travelers, people that are traveling to every country in the world,
1:11.2	all these different travel communities. And he's connecting them through Pangea, which is the
1:17.1	app that he is the founder of. And he's been to 116 countries. He's out there traveling. He's
1:23.8	been to a lot of these community gatherings, these co-living experiences, these
1:27.5	conferences. He's also been in the tech space for a long time. And I thought, who better to give
1:34.4	us an overview of what's going on in the world of travel tech than Matt? So that's why I have
1:40.4	him here. And he is addressing that gap he mentioned at the top and helping to create that urgency
1:44.5	with his business.
	...

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