I’m Michele Ruberl, Mik for most people. I’ve spent 25 years between the systems that sell a trip and the systems that pay for it, mostly at the innovation end: first pilots, new payment rails, standards that don’t exist yet. Then comes the part that decides whether any of it lasts, and it’s the part I like most as an architect: integrations, reconciliation, and systems that keep a booking and its payment in step when something breaks at 3am. The last few years have gone into the AI agents that are starting to book and pay for a trip on their own.
Now
I co-founded Transio to build payment corridors for travel in emerging markets. The guest or the travel agency pays by card or stablecoin, and the hotel, lodge or DMC receives local currency fast, at a rate close to mid-market. We started in East Africa; Southeast Asia is next (transio.network).
At Travel Token Marketplace (TTM) I’m VP Innovation. TTM distributes activities and experiences to travel agencies (travel-token.net). The two jobs fit together: at Hotel Expo Kenya in August the pitch that worked was the combination, experiences that are bookable and payable in one step.
At FairMind I’m Principal AI Architect, designing production-grade GenAI systems for regulated government and enterprise sectors.
Agentic commerce runs through all of it. An AI agent can already plan a good trip. Letting it book and pay is harder: it needs a verified identity, a spending limit the traveller has set, a payment rail it can use and a record of what it did. That gap is what I work on, and much of what I write about here.
Underneath the protocols the point is a human one. Money should move between people as easily as people move between places, so that the guide in Zanzibar gets paid on time and the family gets to the beautiful place they saved for. For a lot of us, that is a good part of what makes the effort worth it.
Background
As CTO of Sandos Hotels & Resorts I built the technology organization from the ground up and reworked the guest experience around digital commerce. At Alpitour, Italy’s largest tour operator, I was Head of Architecture & Integration and brought blockchain innovation to Italian tourism. I was also Director of Blockchain & Web3 at Peakwork, and VP Product at Chain4Travel, where I worked on Camino Network with more than 200 travel partners, Lufthansa Group and TUI among them. With Chain4Travel I was one of the pioneers on the European Central Bank’s innovation platform for the digital euro.
Along the way my teams auctioned the world’s first hotel night as an NFT and set up an on-chain loyalty federation for travel brands. More recently we built agentic itinerary builders for tour operators, for outgoing trips and for incoming destinations. The talks from these years, with videos where they exist, are in Events; what the press wrote about them is in Press.
These days I live between Thailand, Kenya and Italy, in roughly equal shares, and work in five languages.
Contact
I’m always interested in a new problem worth solving. If you’re building something in travel payments or agentic commerce, I enjoy connecting people and sometimes getting involved more directly.
The best way to reach me is LinkedIn, or email at [email protected], also for talks and panels.
This site exists partly so AI agents can find my writing. The same articles are on LinkedIn where the conversation happens.