Sebastian Honores is a bright, energetic visionary I had the pleasure of meeting at the World Aviation Festival in Lisbon this year. What stands out about him is his ability to tackle the complex challenges of travel with a smile, curiosity, and a rebellious spirit that refuses to accept the status quo.
With a decade and a half at platforms like Booking.com and Fever, Sebastian has shaped the experience of millions of travelers. As one of Booking.com's first data scientists, he pioneered data-driven product development during their hyper-growth years. Now, as а founder of Neoke, he's building an agentic identity platform set to revolutionize how we travel.
In our conversation for Dreamix's "State of Aviation" column, Sebastian shares why traditional user-data integration models struggle in the face of technical and regulatory constraints, how behavioral psychology shapes booking decisions, and why aviation is approaching a capacity crisis that infrastructure alone can't solve.
Key Takeaways
- The only constant in the connected trip is the traveller. Point-to-point integrations between travel companies are too complex to scale. The solution is placing digital identity in travelers' hands, enabling consent-driven data sharing across services.
- Aviation faces a quiet capacity crisis. Global passengers will double in 15 years, but infrastructure won't keep pace. Instead of more airports, we need smarter digital trust frameworks to match existing capacity.
- Scale capability, not bureaucracy. Adding management layers replaces product focus with politics. Instead, give managers better tools and systems so they can scale themselves.
- Compliance does enable aviation innovation. Earning trust means aligning with standards bodies and solving real operational problems within existing frameworks.
Q. You spent nearly a decade at Booking.com during its hyper-growth phase. What's one lesson from those years that you're applying to building Neoke?
Honores: At Booking, we often spoke about the “Connected Trip” as the ultimate goal. Over time, I realized that this Connected Trip was an intermediary goal, a means to an end, and that the real objective is to make travel experiences fluid, personalized, and automated.
Now, even to fulfill that intermediary goal, the industry has been struggling, trying to connect the trip through point-to-point integrations - hotel to airline, OTA to car rental. That model is too complex, both technically and legally. Even simple concepts like consent management (“share my data with X, revoke it from Y”) become tangled when managed company-to-company.
And, this is how Neoke was born. For us, the only scalable way to connect the trip is through the traveler: by placing users and their digital identity at the center, we enable secure, consent-driven data sharing across services. Once the trip is connected, the only scalable path to truly seamless, orchestrated travel - where travelers can focus on their journey rather than friction, details, and paperwork - becomes possible.
Q: Neoke is working on digital identity for travel. What's broken about how we travel today that you're most excited to fix?
Honores: Travel has grown dramatically, but the systems that support it may not be able to keep pace. Also, if you think about it, the last “leap forward” in how we travel was the introduction of the mobile boarding pass. Since then, most “innovation” has been cosmetic - but the underlying infrastructure still treats every journey as a series of isolated transactions.
This creates friction everywhere. Every service asks you to start over, re-verify, re-enter, re-consent. The traveler becomes the integration point, carrying fragmented versions of themselves across an ecosystem that doesn’t recognize them.
That’s the gap Neoke is closing. We’re part of a growing network shaping and building the connective tissue of travel. In addition to making flying smoother, our goal is to actually make travel in general more connected, secure, seamless, and personal.
Whether you’re boarding a plane, checking into a hotel, or renting a car, your verified identity should travel with you. That reduces friction, improves personalization, and helps the entire system run more efficiently.
Q: Looking at where aviation is headed in the next 5-10 years, what's one trend or change that most people are underestimating?
Honores: I believe we’re quietly approaching a capacity tipping point - and it’s coming faster than most realize: Global passenger numbers are projected to double within the next 15 years, but the world isn’t doubling its airports, runways, or border officers. Many major hubs are already operating at or near their limits, and the same pressures are visible in cities, transit systems, and tourism hotspots.
This goes beyond aviation. It's a problem that affects the entire system. The infrastructure that moves people simply can’t scale at the same pace as demand - not physically, not administratively.
Managing this growth requires reimagining our infrastructures. Technologies like ours do exactly that: shifting checks, verifications, and eligibility decisions to digital channels before travelers arrive at the airport, which reduces pressure throughout the system.
Unfortunately, few people truly understand how critical this shift is. Building more airports addresses only part of the challenge. The real solution lies in creating smarter trust frameworks that unlock the potential of existing infrastructure, enabling millions more people to travel and explore.
Q: You've mentored a lot of product people over the years. What's the most common mistake you see product leaders make, especially when they're trying to scale?
Honores: When companies scale fast, they often over-layer their organizations. To keep team sizes “manageable,” they add layers of management. And, suddenly, politics replaces product.
You end up with two types of people: those who know how to climb the ladder (optimizing visibility) and those who make a real impact (but get lost in the hierarchy). The latter eventually leave, and the organization becomes self-referential.
The solution is to teach managers to scale themselves - give them better tools, clearer systems, and trust. Fewer layers, more ownership. Scaling should mean amplifying capability, not bureaucracy.
Q: After years of working with millions of travelers, what's something you've learned about how people actually make travel decisions that would surprise most people in the industry?
Honores: When I worked as a data scientist at Booking.com (I was the second data scientist ever hired by Booking), I discovered something fascinating: despite browsing many hotels in one session, most users end up booking the first property they clicked on.
That first click becomes an anchor, a subconscious reference point. They compare every other option against it, only to return and book it later. This psychological pattern sheds light on decision-making. Instead of optimizing, people typically search for validation of their first instinct.
This insight is powerful for designing recommendation systems. Sometimes the goal isn’t to overwhelm users with options, but to guide them toward confidence in the choice they already trust.
Q: How do you lead innovation in an industry where safety and compliance always come first?
Honores: First, by leading with compliance, not around it. We treat it as a catalyst, rather than a constraint. So, we focus on creating technology that enables our partners to stay compliant by design, while still moving fast. That means working closely with regulators and industry bodies to make sure new ideas can scale safely and responsibly.
Secondly, trust is everything in aviation. That’s why Neoke aligns closely with standards bodies like IATA, ISO and ICAO - innovation must be built on certified, interoperable foundations.
Third, we listen deeply to our partners’ pain points. No one cares about your technology unless it solves a real operational, commercial or regulatory problem. So we start from those pains and design solutions that fit seamlessly within their frameworks - not the other way around.
Safety and innovation aren’t opposites; they’re two sides of trust. If you earn trust, partners will innovate with you.
Q: If Neoke succeeds in revolutionizing digital identity for travel, what does a typical airport experience look like in 2030?
Honores: By 2030, most checks will happen before travelers even reach the airport. Digital identities will allow travelers to be pre-cleared, consented, and verified remotely - removing anxiety about documents or eligibility.
At the airport, identity will be verified seamlessly through biometrics - not through queues. Security and immigration will become invisible background processes.
Airports themselves will evolve from processing hubs into hospitality spaces - places for leisure, retail, and connection. Some will even operate like micro-cities, powered by the same digital identity infrastructure that authenticates travelers at every touchpoint - from check-in to retail, to entertainment.
Airports will become living labs for frictionless cities, showing what a trusted, identity-driven ecosystem can look like.
