Sabre is testing an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot with two corporate travel agencies, enabling their customers to interface with the bot for common service and support requests. Sabre’s chatbot leverages Microsoft Bot Framework and Microsoft Cognitive Services, including its Language Understanding Intelligent Service, which provides the tools to enable the bot to understand commands about travel and perform the correct functions. Two agencies are testing a white-labeled version of the chatbot: Travel Solutions International USA in Dallas and Casto Travel in San Francisco. Their travelers can access the bot via Facebook Messenger and use it to complete simple tasks, like changing an existing flight reservation. If the chatbot cannot fulfill the request, the request is handled by a travel agent. “By handling frequently asked basic support requests, the bot will free up our agents to focus on more complex, value-added interactions with travelers,” said Claire LeBuhn, vice president of support services at Travel Solutions International. Throughout the testing period, the agencies and Sabre will evaluate when and how often travelers use the bot. Sabre also said it will track when travelers are likely to need an agent’s assistance. “Travelers want technology to deliver a more seamless experience, especially when managing on-the-go changes and disruptions,” said Mark McSpadden, Sabre’s vice president of emerging technology and products. “Together with Microsoft and our agency partners, we are exploring how AI and chatbots can provide travelers with the self-service solutions they want for routine requests while helping travel agencies provide personal service for more complex needs.” Sabre Hospitality Solutions is also building a chatbot prototype for its hotel clients. It would enable hotels’ customers to shop, book and engage through messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Twitter as well as voice assistants like the Amazon Echo.
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Artificial Intelligence is the buzzword for 2017. AI has infiltrated industries as diverse as personal shopping, executive recruitment and medical diagnostics. Transformational fervor around AI has fizzled in the past, but AI-powered messaging platforms have energized innovation of late. Microsoft Harnesses Machine Learning for Sourcing “The only way that we can serve our travelers is by turning them into data,” travel management provocateur Eric Bailey told BTN. As Microsoft director of travel, venue sourcing and payment, he has pretty much ditched travel policy for a traveler-centric approach, and machine learning has emerged as critical to the effort. Enter the chatbot travel assistant. Startups have thrown down the gauntlet, enabling “virtual travel assistants” as early as 2015; Pana’s irreverent pitch to enterprises in October 2015 began: “Friends Don’t Let Friends Use Concur.” Several more have followed suit: HelloGbye, Mezi, TripActions, 30SecondsToFly and others have introduced mobile travel assistants, touting booking capabilities, with or without integrated corporate policies; offering proactive alerts and disruption support; and even expanding recommendation capabilities to local restaurants and entertainment, which is atypical for corporate travel agency services. So far, the startups have targeted individual corporate travelers and smaller enterprises that have lightly managed programs, minimal preferred supplier agreements and straightforward travel itineraries. But it gets sticky for a bot to digest data and make judgments for negotiated, global managed travel programs that contend with policy parameters, frequent trip disruptions and traveler-initiated changes. That hasn’t stopped established managed travel players from Concur to a number of travel management companies from pursuing similar AI strategies. After it acquired Hipmunk last October, Concur was particularly excited about the Hello Hipmunk AI tool, Concur EVP of platform and data services Tim MacDonald told BTN. He said Concur planned to act as an incubator for Hipmunk to work on bots to benefit the Concur enterprise product suite. On the TMC front, Carlson Wagonlit Travel’s Carla avatar has been in beta for several years, while Australia-based FCM Travel Solutions introduced its message-based mobile travel assistant Sam, which stands for SmartAssist Mobile, last July in the U.S. FCM plans to roll Sam out to Europe and Asia this year. American Express Global Business Travel has not announced a chatbot, but Oliver Quayle, VP of product marketing and innovation for Amex GBT and KDS now that the two have merged, cited GBT’s database as central to KDS’s post-merger innovation map, which looks like it will favor AI and machine learning and may build on the predictive and personalized approach of KDS’s Neo booking tool. Startup Ditches Mega for App Solution ThoughtSpot may be a small company, with 100 travelers, but it’s got big ambitions and international office locations. After launch, it chose a mega agency and a well-known expense provider. ThoughtSpot enjoyed the service and the agency rates, but as an agile startup, it was looking for a level of technology innovation it wasn’t getting from the big agency. What’s the Goal? “When I talk internally, I always tell the story of the great travel agent during my time as a road warrior at IBM when I traveled 150 nights a year,” said Travelport senior director of product innovation Nathan Bobbin. “She knew everything that I wanted in my constantly changing schedule. She’d say, ‘Hey, I know you’re supposed to go home, but instead, you are going to Tel Aviv. So here’s the trip I booked for you. You’re at the Marriott because I know you love Marriott; I didn’t take the early flight because there was no aisle seat. There’s an extra connection, but I knew you’d be OK with that …’ And she was always right because she knew all that stuff about me. That’s the experience powering the dream of AI, machine learning, personalization and mobile, where all those capabilities come together so that everyone can have one of those amazing travel agents in their pocket.” Microsoft global director of travel, venue sourcing and payment Eric Bailey painted a comparison that makes today’s standard corporate online booking tool experience seem absurd. “You can almost go through the insane conversation you would have with an OBT: ‘Please give me an hour with a plus- or minus-three-hour range as to when you want to leave. In return, I’ll give you the lowest price without any reference to what your preferences are, and I don’t care if it’s a dollar cheaper or $1,000 cheaper.’” Personalization and predictive results are just two features chatbot travel assistants aim to provide. Amid 24/7, globalized business and travel disruptions, imagine round-the-clock alerts and predictive rebooking support. Also within reach are expanded services that can recommend local restaurants and make reservations or that can identify entertainment and fitness options that appeal to the individual traveler. Indeed, some apps like Mezi and Pana claim they already can handle some of these details. How Do We Get There? The short answer is data—and lots of it. Co-founder and CEO Swapnil Shinde described Mezi’s behind-the-scenes structure: “When a user sends a message to Mezi, several different chatbots begin collaborating with one another. If AI detects that the user’s intent is to look and book flights, a flight chatbot will start talking to the customer. If the intent is hotel, a hotel bot will talk to the customer. So then we have a bot for dining and one for payments; we even have a bot for reminders and marketing.” Aternate Route for AI Bots: Agency Tech Everyone who talks about travel bots mentions Lola. Co-founded by Paul English, former co-founder of Kayak, it has focused on consumer travel, though its website refers to “premier partnerships” that give executives of “select companies” access to its services. Early press focused on the team’s effort to evolve travel agency tech, with an expectation that the company would pursue that market, where artificial intelligence could transform the current green-screen environments and increasingly fragmented content. All these bots are powered by data feeds. Mezi uses global distribution system content, Expedia content, Priceline content. TripActions, for another example, has agreements
New technology offers airlines’ guests the digital experience they’ve been seeking and expecting. For airlines, this is another step toward becoming expert retailers. For their customers, it means greater customer satisfaction. Not so long ago, the airline industry was focused primarily on ways to cut costs and increase efficiencies to effectively compete and ultimately stay in business. Without a doubt, those areas are still important, even necessary, but the rather recent emergence of the customer experience as a key brand differentiator is reshaping the development of airline strategies and attitudes toward their passengers. Much of this shift can be attributed to the realization by the industry that the volumes of passenger data generated by robust technology can be collected and interpreted, given the right tools, to provide valuable insights into customer behavior and experiences. In turn, this information can be utilized by airlines with customer-centricity solutions, such as the SabreSonic Customer-Centric Retailing Platform, to develop personalized product/service offerings to address customers’ unique needs and desires and enhance their experience at every touchpoint of their journey, while taking into account operational factors. Valuable resources are wasted, then, if the technology employed to deliver these offers to customers through various direct and indirect channels is outdated, inefficient and inconsistent. Therefore, some of the most important retailing decisions an airline can make center around offer execution, the optimal presentation of an offer to the customer. Soaring mobile statistics For many industries and individuals alike, mobile has become the preferred platform for conducting business. Today’s marketplace moves rapidly, making the on-the-go capability of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, particularly appealing. The International Data Corporation estimates that by the end of this year, 3.2 billion people — 44 percent of the world’s population — will have access to the internet, and 2 billion will be using mobile devices to do so. The majority of airline customers, in particular, are considered tech savvy. According to the 2015 SITA Passenger IT Trends Survey, 83 percent of passengers carry smartphones, while 15 percent travel with three mobile devices (smartphone, tablet and laptop). For airlines, this provides a unique opportunity to incorporate passenger data with context-aware technology to enhance the end-to-end customer experience, beginning with shopping and ending with post-trip follow up. Most passengers, it seems, are eager to engage with airlines via mobile devices. The same survey notes that this year alone, airline bookings via such devices are expected to rise 39 percent, check-in, 79 percent, and boarding-pass delivery, 110 percent. Clearly today’s airline customers are all too happy to forego the long lines and congestion once simply considered part of the traditional airport experience in favor of a more personalized digital experience at their own pace, often off-site. Challenges to the optimal offer Despite encouraging passenger feedback, airlines face a number of challenges in the execution of a consistent and timely offer through web-based direct and indirect channels. Customer-centric companies in other industries have set the bar high, and while airline operations and revenue management technology have soared ahead, dynamic retailing practices are fairly new to carriers and the technology to support these intricate transactions continues to be generally unreliable and inadequate. The majority of carriers today have some type of e-commerce roadmap incorporated into their overall strategy, and they are looking for the best value for their investments. Third-party vendors, including web and interface designers and specialty IT providers, offer a variety of stand-alone solutions. However, most are developed in isolation and require manual intervention to collect and integrate the necessary information from passenger-service and operational systems, resulting in delayed and inconsistent offers. While these solutions may meet current challenges, the continued exponential growth of customer data (due in large part to the rising popularity of mobile devices) and evolution of the airline industry toward a retailing mindset requires airlines to address the long-term need for a more robust IT architecture that is extremely flexible, scalable and able to handle thousands of sophisticated transactions using real-time or near real-time data in a matter of seconds. While they may not be equipped to handle such an assignment on their own, most businesses, airlines included, are understandably somewhat reluctant to hand any part of their operations over to someone else. Instead, most start with the belief that they possess the time, money and talent to effectively and efficiently make the necessary transitions to remain competitive. However, the airline industry’s shift in focus to the end-to-end customer experience, with an emphasis on retailing, in particular, has proven to be quite complex. Traditionally, airline management has possessed little in the way of retailing expertise, as well as the development and execution of digital strategies. As a result, many airlines quickly discover that rather than focusing resources on areas of which they have limited knowledge, they should instead strengthen their unique differentiating factors and turn common, core tasks over to aviation IT providers to decrease time to market and increase cost savings and operational efficiencies. SabreSonic digital experience To assist airlines as they make inroads into this new territory, Sabre Airline Solutions has identified four strategic areas of concentration within SabreSonic Customer Sales and Service, the industry’s only seamless, end-to-end customer sales and service solution: Customer experience, Airports reimagined, Airline retailing, Big data and analytics. The Customer-Centric Retailing Platform is an integral part of airline retailing, as is the SabreSonic Web Digital Experience, a customer-focused, innovation-driven solution designed to optimize web-based offer execution for airlines via direct and indirect distribution channels. Developed in partnership with SabreSonic airline clients, the Digital Experience is constantly evolving and expanding to support the next generation of e-commerce. The architecture The Digital Experience platform is situated on top of the Customer-Centric Retailing Platform and connected by a JSON layer. This integration enables the exchange of contextually-rich customer data between SabreSonic core services applications, including payment, shopping and fulfillment; the Customer-Centric Retailing Platform, encompassing ancillaries, personalization, brands and non-air sales; and the Digital Experience, which distributes the optimized offer throughout various web-based channels. The
The Entrada platform, through its integration with MyFareBox the leading B2B global airfare platform by Mystifly, incorporates Aegean Airlines and Olympic Airways into its exhaustive content from 750+ IATA and non-IATA airlines, including 180+LCCs. With this move, MyFareBox will now provide domestic fares that are not available to the major GDSs to all Entrada users. The major destinations in Greece that will be applicable in MyFareBox are the following: With primary base in Athens International Airport “Eleftherios Venizelos” and secondary hub at “Diagoras” Airport in Rhodes and Macedonia Airport in Thessaloniki, Olympic Air performs approximately 168 flights per day, travelling to a total of 33 Greek destinations. Domestic Flights Olympic Air has direct flights from / to Athens to Alexandroupolis, Chania, Chios, Heraklion, Ikaria, Ioannina, Karpathos, Kalamata, Kavala, Kerkyra, Kefalonia, Kos, Kythira Leros, Limnos, Mykonos, Milos, Mytilini, Naxos, Paros, Preveza, Rhodes, Samos, Santorini, Skiathos, Skiros, Sitia, Thessaloniki and Zakynthos. Also Olympic Air has direct flights from / to Thessaloniki to Athens, Chania, Chios, Heraklion, Kalamata, Kerkyra, Kos, Mykonos, Mytilini, Paros, Samos, Santorini, Skyros and Rhodes. Rhodes Airport connects with Samos, Chios, Mytilini, Limnos and Kos, Kalymnos, Leros and Astypalea. Through MyFareBox, travel providers will now be able to get: Savings between 20-40% on airline fares by ticketing through MyFareBox 24×7, 365 days support for bookings, amendments and cancellations Customised branding on e-tickets Option to hold PNR on time, mitigating the possible loss associated with uncertain PNR status Ease of payment through multiple payment and multi-currency options for bookings About Mystifly Mystifly is an anywhere-to-anywhere global airfare marketplace offering airfare consolidation from 750+ airlines including 180+ LCCs, multi-GDSs and fares sourced from 70+ points of sale countries in the Americas, EMEA and APAC. Founded in 2009, the company focuses on applying the right mix of technology and inventive thought process to create solutions that can disrupt air travel. Mystifly’s flagship air ticketing platform – MyFareBox, along with a suite of technology – driven products today are empowering over 2500 customers globally to service their customers better. This includes 22 of the top 50 UK TMCs, 60+ global OTAs, and 9 of the top 10 Indian TMCs among several others. Awarded as World’s Leading Airline Consolidator by World Travel Awards 2015 and 2016, Mystifly has ticketed 34000+ city pairs spread over 190 origin countries in 2016. For more details, visit: www.mystifly.com About Entrada Entrada is an online travel reservation platform that allows the users to buy, sell and distribute via Internet, all of their travel related products & services. It also offers a flexible and customizable B2B, B2C & B2B2C online booking engine which couples together schedules & LCC flights with various land services (hotels, transfers, packages, rental cars, etc.) Currently there are more than 800000 online bookable hotels in our system, more than 10,000 transfer services in 80 countries & 2,500 major cities, rental cars in 180 countries & 10,500 locations, scheduled and private flight fares from Sabre and from more than 100 low-cost airlines.