After Betting Big on Travel AI, Pangea Doubles Down with Real-World Experiences

‍NEW YORK, NY – September 10, 2026 — Pangea, the AI platform for social travel and real-world experiences, today announced Pangea Trips, a curated collection of social travel experiences for its global community.

The lineup centers on small-group adventures to off-the-beaten-path destinations, alongside Coworking Chapters, interest-led trips, local meetups and larger community gatherings.

The launch follows Pangea’s recent acquisition of Flaire’s AI portfolio, including its proprietary Place Genome, developed through more than $6 million in strategic R&D, strengthening Pangea’s ability to personalize travel discovery through AI and trusted recommendations from like-minded travelers.

‍Pangea Trips brings that intelligence into the real world.‍

Itineraries are inspired by the community of more than 100,000 travelers, including highly experienced explorers who have visited every country in the world. Their firsthand recommendations help shape where groups stay, eat and explore.

‍“AI is transforming how people plan travel and dominates the conversation about the future of the industry. But ultimately, it’s just a tool, not the end goal,” said Matt Gray, Founder & CEO of Pangea, who is on a mission to visit every country in the world. “After 12 years of traveling to 123 countries, I keep coming back to the same thing: the experiences you have and the people you share them with are what make travel meaningful. Pangea Trips takes the intelligence we’re building through AI and our social platform and puts it to work in the real world, helping people experience extraordinary places with incredible groups of people.”‍

A Decade in the Making

Pangea Trips formalizes something Gray and the broader community have been doing for years: organizing trips for friends since 2016.

The idea for Pangea took shape during a backpacking trip, when Gray and three friends watched the sunset over the Gulf of Thailand and a simple idea emerged: Rethink Reality. Redefine Possible. Build something that helps people Explore the World, Together. That conversation laid the foundation for Pangea’s mission today.

Since then, the Pangea team has organized experiences across more than 100 countries, from the vast deserts of Mauritania and the Atacama to the wild landscapes of Botswana, Greenland and South Sudan, the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia and even some of the most remote islands in the South Pacific.

In 2026, Pangea piloted more than 50 IRL trips and events, bringing roughly 1,000 people together through highlights including its 2026 Serendipity Summit atop Table Mountain and its summer launch event, which featured a series of community-led meetups spanning six continents from Sydney to Los Angeles. These experiences piloted the model that Pangea Trips will now formalize and scale.

Caroline Lupini Joins as Head of Experiences

To lead the expansion, Caroline Lupini is joining Pangea as Head of Experiences, bringing more than 12 years of full-time travel experience and a mandate to build Pangea’s broader IRL business. She has visited 130 countries, moderates the off-the-beaten-path travel community Every Passport Stamp, and is the longtime managing editor of Forbes Advisor, Credit Cards & Travel Rewards.

Together, Gray and Lupini are building a curated Host network drawn from their personal connections within Pangea’s broader community: experienced travelers and community architects who have led many of these trips before, know where to go and what to skip, and can draw on trusted local recommendations to create exceptional group experiences.

"Afer more than a decade of full-time travel across 130 countries, my favorite trips have often been where you’d least expect. Think: Somaliland, Turkmenistan, the places where the logistics are far from straightforward," said Lupini who also aspired to visit every country. "Those are harder to do alone, and they're the ones where a good group makes the biggest difference. My job is knowing how to build the best itinerary, which week to go, and who should lead it. We're building the trips I'd want to go on myself."
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Off the Beaten Path, By Design

Pangea Trips are open to everyone, whether they work remotely, occasionally work while traveling or want to disconnect completely. The 2027 calendar is designed around connection and community, featuring several types of experiences.
Adventure Expeditions are small-group journeys to unusual, less-traveled or logistically challenging destinations where the right local knowledge and group can materially improve the experience.

Initial destinations include Angola, Iraq, Kilimanjaro, Central Asia, West Africa and even the South Pacific, along with more traditional destinations like Peru, South Africa and Spain. Additional departures will be announced throughout 2027.
Coworking Chapters will bring travelers together to live, work and explore destinations for several weeks at a time, building on Pangea’s roots in remote work and the extensive partnership network added through its Nomadago acquisition. Upcoming chapters will include a diverse mix of destinations such as New Zealand, Tunisia, Bolivia, Mongolia, and Somaliland.

The calendar will also include interest-led trips focused on fitness, wellness, extreme travel, nutrition, food and local discovery, with future trips spanning scuba diving, skiing, kitesurfing, hiking, surfing and more.

Pangea’s trips sit alongside its annual Serendipity Summit, a gathering for the wider community to come together. The next Serendipity Summit will return to Cape Town alongside NomadWeek, with future editions planned around the world as unique, large-format events.

AI for Discovery. People for the Experience.

Across all its experiences, Pangea starts with three questions: Who knows this place exceptionally well? What would they tell their friends to try? And who would be excited to experience it together?

This approach is powered by Pangea’s broader technology stack: the Place Genome and social recommendation technology acquired through Flaire, Travel DNA, and more than a million trusted recommendations from the community. This enables Pangea to understand the granular facets of a destination and how they map onto a traveler’s tastes based on a living understanding of where they’ve been, how they travel and the experiences that resonate most. The result is increasingly personalized guidance around where someone should go, what they should experience and who they should experience it with.

Pangea Trips is the real-world application of that intelligence, leveraging the same data that shape digital discovery to influence where groups stay and eat, which neighborhoods they explore, the hidden places they seek out and how travelers are brought together around shared interests and energy. AI helps identify what is likely to matter; Pangea’s community and deep firsthand travel expertise turn that intelligence into experiences worth joining.

And the relationship works both ways. Every journey makes a traveler’s Travel DNA richer, the Place Genome smarter, and future experiences more relevant.

Pangea now joins a small category of pioneers focused on what it believes is the most important part of the future of travel: how people experience the world and who they experience it with. By bringing its technology, global community and deep firsthand travel expertise together in the real world, Pangea is building a model where digital discovery and real-world experiences continually reinforce one another, positioning the company to become a category leader across digital discovery and real-world experiences.

About Pangea

Pangea is the AI platform for social travel and real-world experiences, led and advised by former ION Group executives applying a proven M&A-driven consolidation strategy to one of consumer tech’s most fragmented categories.
With three acquisitions completed, Pangea is consolidating fragmented travel apps and communities into a single ecosystem, combining their data, networks and technology to build an AI platform for personalized travel discovery, connection and recommendations. Its global community creates an immediate path to sustainability through IRL trips, events and experiences, while the resulting data, network and technology compound toward Pangea’s long-term vision to build the AI social platform for travel.

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Pangea’s mission: Explore the World, Together.
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PangeaTrips.com

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