Custom Travel Solutions (CTS) Revolutionizes AI Travel Bookings with RouteStack API as Mike Putman Empowering Startups and Redefining Loyalty Programs

Custom Travel Solutions (CTS), founded by Mike Putman, has developed a game-changing solution for AI-powered travel bookings. By leveraging RouteStack, an API that connects AI agents to over three million hotels, 950 airlines, and 40+ car rental brands, CTS closes the gap between AI assistants providing travel advice and actually executing real-time bookings. This technology offers live inventory, real pricing, and integrates complex supplier rules, ensuring seamless bookings with real options and prices. With Amadeus sunsetting its self-serve portal in 2026, CTS’s RouteStack allows indie developers to experiment freely with its free sandbox and simplified API access. AI is also transforming loyalty programs, turning passive point collection into active, hyper-personalized concierge services. The future of autonomous travel booking hinges on trust, particularly at the payment stage, where human confirmation is still needed for security. Despite tightening API access, RouteStack aims to democratize travel innovation, offering a path for startups to create powerful, AI-driven tools without requiring massive budgets.

How does your new technology allow AI assistants like ChatGPT to move beyond simple advice and actually execute real-time bookings? 

The honest answer is that we’re not trying to complete the booking inside the chat – and that distinction matters. Where most AI assistants stall is the gap between “here are five hotels in Lisbon” and the user actually getting a confirmed reservation. That gap exists because live inventory, real pricing, and the messy reality of supplier rules don’t sit inside a language model.

RouteStack closes that gap by giving AI agents one API into the same GDS-backed inventory the rest of the travel industry runs on, over three million hotels, 950 airlines, and forty-plus car rental brands (vacation rentals & activity inventory to come). The agent queries live availability, surfaces real options with real prices, and hands off to a deep-link checkout where the traveler completes payment in a trusted environment. The booking is real. The agent is honest about its lane. That’s the model we think holds up.

With Amadeus sunsetting its self-serve portal in July 2026, how will this “entry barrier”  impact indie developers and the speed of travel innovation? 

July 17, 2026 is going to be a meaningful moment for a generation of developers who built on Amadeus’s self-service tier. The on-paper alternative, going through enterprise sales, signing volume commitments, and navigating GDS contracts, is fine if you’re a Series B startup with a procurement team. It’s a wall if you’re one developer with a side project on a Friday night.

The risk isn’t that travel innovation stops. It’s that it consolidates. The hobbyists, the indie builders, the “I just want to prototype something this weekend” crowd,  that’s where most genuinely new ideas in travel come from, and that’s the layer most exposed by this shutdown. We built RouteStack’s free sandbox specifically because we don’t want that layer to disappear. Spin up a key, hit the API, build something. The economics of distribution shouldn’t decide who gets to experiment.

How is AI transforming traditional loyalty programs from simple point-collecting into automated, hyper-personalized concierge services? 

The shift is from passive accrual to active representation. Old-model loyalty was a ledger,  you stayed somewhere, you got points, and you logged in to a portal to redeem them. The traveler did all the work. The AI-driven model flips that: an agent that knows your status, your stated preferences, your historical patterns, and your current trip context can argue on your behalf in real time.

Concretely, that means surfacing the right hotel because it matches your tier benefits, not because it’s top of the search results. It means knowing you’d take the longer layover for the lounge access. IDC is forecasting that by 2030, 30% of travel bookings will be executed by AI agents,  and the loyalty programs that win in that environment will be the ones whose data is structured well enough for an agent to actually use. The point isn’t to collect points anymore. It’s to be legible to the agent representing the traveler.

You often mention “Agentic AI”—what is the single biggest technical hurdle to making fully  autonomous travel booking a global reality? 

Trust at the moment of payment. Models are good enough today to plan, compare, negotiate, and recommend. They are not yet at a place where most travelers, or most regulators, are comfortable handing over a credit card and saying “go.” The hurdle isn’t intelligence. It’s authorization, dispute resolution, and what happens when the agent gets it wrong on a non-refundable fare.

That’s why our architecture intentionally keeps the human in the loop at checkout. The agent does the heavy lifting: understanding the request, querying inventory, ranking options, and applying preferences. The human confirms and pays. Over time, as identity, payment authorization, and liability frameworks mature, that boundary will move. But pretending it doesn’t exist today is how you get headlines about travelers being charged for trips they didn’t take.

Is the tightening of API access creating a divide where only large tech firms can build AI  travel tools, or is there still a path for startups?

The risk is real. When the cost of touching live travel inventory is a six-figure annual minimum and a six-month integration cycle, you’ve essentially zoned the industry for incumbents. Most of the interesting AI-native travel ideas right now are coming from solo builders and small teams — the exact people who can’t clear that bar.

But it’s not destiny. The path for startups is for someone to absorb that complexity at the infrastructure layer and expose it as something a developer can actually use — credit-based pricing, sensible documentation, a free sandbox to prove the idea before committing capital. That’s the bet behind RouteStack. The next great travel product probably isn’t going to be built by the company with the biggest enterprise sales team. It’ll be built by someone who couldn’t have afforded to build it eighteen months ago.