Crew Travel: AI & Risks
The following is an edited transcript, shortened or summarised in places for reasons of space, of the latest SMI webinar, titled “Crew Travel: AI and Risks’.
Held online in early February 2026, this discussion- featured eminent panellists:
Konstantinos (‘Kostas’) Oikonomou, CEO, Marine Tours; Chris Podolsky,
General Manager, North America & Global Head of Sales, Global Marine Travel (GMT); Cameron Bengert, Head of Operations, Clyde Travel Management; and
George Kyvernitis, Managing Partner, Kyvernitis. Moderator was Sean Moloney,
CEO of Elaborate Communications & SMI Publisher.
Sean Moloney
Hello and welcome everybody. Now there’s a lot happening in shipping at the moment, a lot of stresses and pressures that ship owners and charters and managers are going through, and crew are going through as well. I’m sure that is starting to come through in the travel sector too, so I’m going to ask everybody to introduce themselves and say a few introductory words on the subject, beginning with you please, George.
George Kyvernitis
Great! First of all, Sean, thanks for having us. I am George, and Kyvernitis is a significant player into the crew travel marketing industry here in Greece with clients in Greece and abroad. And I think the challenges that we’re currently facing are many. Obviously, technology us one, where few that we speak to can really relate to what technology is or when they when get good technology into the market.
And I think the habits of the market haven’t changed either. Cients are still as demanding as they used to be and still as price sensitive as they used to be. Not much has changed. So patience is needed, as we constantly try to stay active and progressive in how we service our clients, and try to find innovative ways to reach as much value as we can against the existing relationships that they already have or relationships that we are looking to have.
Sean Moloney
Brilliant! Thank you very much, George. A few points here that we’ll be touching on in our discussion in a few minutes. Kostas, you’re next.
Konstantinos Oikonomou
Hello, I’m the CEO of Marine Tours Group. We are a travel management organisation specializing in the marine and offshore sector as well as corporate travel. And our having been in the business for the last 46 years, I’m obviously second generation. And I’m really happy to be here as it’s really educational to see the insights from other market players as well.
With the global marine industry, the big challenge is we don’t know what’s coming next. Geopolitical intervention is something we can only adapt to, it’s not that we can do anything. We don’t know what is going to come to us next.
Secondly, coming to our side, definitely technology and distribution technology is a basic issue. Our suppliers, the airlines, are not making our life easier. Sure, they’re a lot more educated after the COVID period. They have realised the importance of the maritime industry and they have learned a lot as regards what is ‘blue travel’, which has been put on the map. So that’s a good thing, but there are bad things as well. On the one side you have airlines that want to increase their returns, and on the other you have the clients that don’t want to pay as much. And we’re in the middle, trying to do the best possible at the end of the day.
Finally, I would say AI is a challenge, in the sense that the market may think a lot of it, but maybe it’s not there and it’s not going to do the miracles everybody thinks it is. This is a challenge because I think all of us will have to pay top dollars to adopt AI technologies. But I don’t know how this will be able to be monetised and absorbed by the market, our market.
Sean Moloney
Thank you very much indeed, Kostas. Some very valid points there. Okay, Cameron, could you please introduce yourself and your thoughts on all this would be most welcome.
Cameron Bengert
Thank you, Sean, and thanks for inviting me here today. I’m the Head of Operations at Clyde Travel Management, and I think it’s important that as an industry we stay outward focused. We share many of the same challenges, and if we learn from one another, we can make crew movements easier for everyone.
If I break the challenges down into three categories, I would first start with cost control. That’s been mentioned already, but it’s the obvious one. There’s volatility in fares - not just the original ticket, but the last minute crew changes. When we have to make reissues or issue new tickets, everything shifts, and we need to make sure we’re still delivering value for money for the crew. We need to be proactive. If customers are going to ChatGPT to ask how to save money, that tells me we are not in the right place having that conversation. I’d want them to come to us for that expertise. So it’s not just about finding the fare when asked - it’s about helping them make better decisions.
The second category is seafarer wellbeing. We’re hearing a lot more about it, which is a good thing. It’s not just a “nice to have,” because an exhausted crew member turning up to work after a milk run of flights is a risk. We hear first hand of seafarers taking the long route to save fifty pounds - but what’s the actual impact on that individual, and on the success of the crew change?
The third category is process efficiency and technology integration. When you look at logistics today, a lot of it is held together by pure human heroics - spreadsheets, whiteboards, constant handovers. Meanwhile, we live in a world where AI can provide answers and written content in seconds. So the leap we need to make is moving crewing logistics from that manual, high touch environment into something more digital, more integrated, and more reliable.
Sean Moloney
Okay, thank you very much, Cameron. We’ll come on to AI again later in the questions. Chris, if you can please introduce yourself and offer some points of perspective.
Chris Podolsky
Good morning, everybody, and Sean, thank you. I’m Chris Podolsky and I’m Head of Global Sales for Global Marine Travel and I’m General Manager for North America.
I think I agree that growth rate in the industry is something that we’re all running to keep pace with. The current state of play with the geopolitical issues out there, which again puts additional stresses on the governmental side of our business, the visa challenges. And the airlines certainly aren’t doing us any favours with their pricing pressures.
Then I would say one of the things that seems to be changing over the last few years is that there’s a lot of new technology out in the industry right now. And with new technology, quite often ship owners, ship managers, customers use that as an opportunity to re-evaluate their suppliers. Or it may be other suppliers that are bringing the technology toward with the aim of supplanting the existing suppliers and other suppliers within the company.
So adapting to this and ensuring that you have the technology, that you have the tools that you’re able to come with what’s needed to solve these issues that the owners and the ship managers are looking for, I think that’s key. If you’re just sitting waiting for your phone to ring and you get that phone call that says, ‘hey, we’re re-evaluating suppliers’, that’s where you’re going to start to understand that you are falling behind.
Sean Moloney
Thanks, Chris. Some valid points there. So we’ve had the introductions and we’re going to jump right in with the questions now. Starting with AI – Kostas, how are you at Kyvernitis utilising AI now to your benefit when you know clients are going to be using it to re-evaluate, as Chris says, their suppliers?
Konstantinos Oikonomou
At the moment. I think we have ‘small heroes’ living in travel organisations, that are fighting to consolidate information prior to offering a quotation. They’re fighting with different and diverse interfaces, which part of the information is there, another part of the information is there, and it has to be consolidated. So, AI has not yet penetrated, let’s say, the investigation technology, although I know for a fact that airlines are using AI for their own revenue systems to increase the revenue yield they receive from the market. Now, from our side, I think that the sector is in the discovery phase, how we can utilise AI for internal automation as a first step, prior to seeing what we can do for the market, for an end-user interface. I’m using ‘discovery phase’ because I think AI is a super useful technology, but we are all in the discovery phase.
Chris Podolsky
I think we have to recognise that there’s AI in almost every tool we use today, any type of technology or automation tool we use today. It’s in the booking platforms that we’re all using for our customers. With GPT, we’re actually using it quite a bit. As we’re starting to develop, we’re using those tools that will help better with, as Costas mentioned, aggregating content in order to make sure that we’re providing the needs for our customers to consume our full content, when the airlines are parking different fares on their websites. There are different fares in different locations, and it’s important that you’re able to aggregate that in a way that your customers have that choice. But we’re using it for back-office reconciliation work. Our commercial teams are using enterprise AI for KYC (Know Your Customer) functions, background checks, identifying UBOs (Ultimate Beneficial Owners) and sanctions checks. So there’s a lot of ways that it’s being implemented today.
And one thing we have to make sure that we all are aware of, which we’re not, is that the pace of this is frightening, how fast things are moving. So I think technology and data-driven optimisation are key in our industry right now. And as I mentioned earlier, ship owners are investing in new crew planning software that involves all aspects of the journey, travel just being one part of the door-to-deck experience. It’s very good because it’s fully automated from the TMC (Travel Management Company) perspective. But it does put full control of pricing with the owners, which can drive pricing down.
George Kyvernitis
AI is the big thing right now. There are so many investments being done in the space of AI. As a matter of fact, a lot of shipping companies are currently using AI to get results on how they can optimise the way that they process some of the internal operations that they have. And I see that more and more often.
Unfortunately, with the way that the whole content is being distributed to us, we’re left with very limited options, even though we/I personally feel that it’s a one-way road to use AI within the business. So currently we’re using AI to improve the speed and accuracy and basically the company in internal operations. I think that basically, as a service- oriented company, we have a lot to save from using technology and using AI. And I think that will be a focus of the future. The core rotations. I think that the complexity of the core rotations, the compliance that still requires jurisdictions to be checked based on visas. And the fact that we still have a long way to go until we offer it as an alternative to any of the clients.
And I would like to raise a third point, which I have found a lot over the last couple of year, and I think that has to do not just with AI, but with technology in general. Given that we are a service provider and, as mentioned, we are a middleman here, we find a lot of times that we need to balance between the adaption of technology and that of the client. In a lot of cases, shipping companies do use AI for making their operations smarter. But at the same time, they don’t open the door to connect those systems to the systems that we might have to make the full use of that technology. So there are limitations to that. And I think we are entitled to make a lot of assumptions depending on who the client is and what their technology adaption is.
Cameron Bengert
I’m sure we could spend a long time on this topic alone. AI really is a revolution - an information revolution - and the impact will be on the scale of the major ones that came before it.
It helps to remind myself not to underestimate how adaptable humans are. When COVID hit, we were getting crew around the world while working from home. I started my role from home and didn’t meet any of my colleagues for a couple of years. But we still ran a business, moved crew globally, and navigated situations where countries shut the doors to seafarers on a Friday night and only realised the mistake on Monday morning.
So yes, humans will adapt. The question is: what does AI enhance? For this to be meaningful, you need governance and security in place first. We have to make sure we’re using secure models, that our data and our customers’ data are protected. You need a security and governance framework before people start pasting sensitive information into an AI tool.
Our customers will still look to us for expertise, but expectations will rise. As AI helps automate more of the routine work, clients will expect faster and more complex answers - things like whether it’s less expensive to crew change in one port versus another for specific nationalities. Those insights will become easier once AI can interact reliably with the data. But again: it needs to be secure, and it needs to be governed.
Sean Moloney
Well, our time’s up and I want to thank all of you today for what has been a fascinating discussion. There’s a lot happening in the industry and we could have carried on chatting for another hour or so. It’s an exciting time, it really is, and it’s all about being prepared and working with partners to make things turn out the way you want them and as the market wants. Thank you very much indeed everybody for your time today.