I love summer. The flowers are blooming, the veg garden is thriving, and somehow the bind weed is still outperforming everything. As I wrestled with it in the blistering heat, another kind of “The Green Hell” came to mind – the nickname of Germany’s Nürburgring Nordschleife, home of the brutal 24-hour endurance race recently tackled by Max Verstappen.

Verstappen already has a reputation for obsessive practice and unusual driving feel, as did Ayrton Senna before him. Senna’s famous feathering of the clutch and throttle through corners involved tiny, impossibly precise inputs repeated so often they became instinctive. By the time others noticed what he was doing, it was almost impossible to copy.

With the summer sports season ahead, it got me thinking about how elite athletes train. Novak Djokovic’s perfectly compact two-handed backhand, Harry Kane’s near-perfect penalties. The same movement repeated thousands of times until it becomes instinctive.

Now, imagine you’re a decent club player. You’ve spent years hitting a backhand a certain way, won matches and feel competent. Or you’ve put the ball in the net often enough not to disgrace yourself.

Then along comes a Djokovic who adjusts your racquet grip, or a Kane who tells you to lean forward more. When you try it, it feels ridiculous. Worse, it feels wrong. You’re fighting years of instinct and muscle memory.

But eventually something clicks. Suddenly, you realise you weren’t playing as well as you thought– not because you lacked talent, but because nobody had ever shown you a different way.

“Most people don’t know what to question in order to evolve”

That’s not a revolution. It’s evolution. Most people don’t know what to question in order to evolve. They lack the prompt to challenge the habit or to question the ‘norm’.

That’s our industry. The biggest inefficiencies in travel technology often come from inherited processes, systems and assumptions built up over decades.

They’ve been repeated so often they’ve become instinctive: “this is where the data lives”, “this is how bookings flow”, “this is the role of the GDS”, we’re told.

Until someone asks: what if it doesn’t have to be like that?

When we launched TripStax, I was told repeatedly that we were trying to change 30 years of industry muscle memory overnight. We were never trying to revolutionise the industry. We ask questions and offer a different way of thinking.

TMCs no longer need to cling to outdated practices or remain constrained by legacy technology. There’s a new way without disrupting your entire gameplay.

It may feel unfamiliar at first, but once the data foundations are right, everything else becomes possible – including unlocking the real value of AI. Then, you’ll soon realise the old way feels absurd.

Oh, and if Novak would like to fix my backhand, I remain available.

tripstax.com