Artificial Intelligence is transforming the travel industry across the board. Some examples of best practices were presented on Wednesday afternoon at a conference at ITB Berlin.
Until now, 60% of Lufthansa customers prefer to make traditional reservations via the website’s search engine. But the process is changing. “The entire travel ecosystem is really undergoing a transformation,” explained Dr. Olaf Backofen from Lufthansa. The group is already successfully using AI to create newsletters and content. In addition, they are currently running an A/B test on the website of their subsidiary, Swiss, focusing on “Conversational Booking”. This allows them to discover what resonates with customers. The Lufthansa Group is working with the provider Swifty, which specializes in AI-based booking solutions.
Productivity increased by 75%
The Lufthansa Group has already achieved a concrete benefit through AI-supported customer complaint processing. Complaints, which until now were very “bulk” and recorded in different languages, are processed and structured by artificial intelligence developed in collaboration with Microsoft. As a result, the productivity of employees handling these complaints has increased by 75%.
AI assistants are already part of everyday life at TUI
TUI has also integrated Artificial Intelligence into its operations. The company has developed an AI assistant for employees. Specifically, 1,500 different agents all work on the basis of Big Language Models but keep the data in-house. In 1,200 travel agencies, AI assistants are now used in telephone interactions with the company’s service agents, helping to listen and answer questions more quickly.
In direct contact with the customer, as Andr? Exner from TUI Group explained at the ITB Conference, AI is already being used. In the UK, 100% of users of the company’s holiday assistance app now have the option to search and book traditionally or via a chatbot.
Performance is doubling every six months
Michael Guimet, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft Copilot, highlighted the benefits of AI for optimizing business processes. Air India employees have now integrated Microsoft Copilot and its extensions into their Teams software, which helps them quickly assess large amounts of data and draw conclusions from it. Michael Guimet predicted that further comprehensive and rapid changes are expected as the performance of AI models doubles approximately every six months.
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