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EasyJet holidays has revealed its AI-powered chatbot now handles around 45% of customer enquiries made while on holiday without requiring human intervention.
The operator said customer satisfaction scores for the chatbot were eight percentage points higher than for traditional telephone interactions, while its cost of service had fallen by 10% despite holiday volumes growing by 22%.
Speaking at the Abta Travel Convention in Madeira, chief operating officer Matt Callaghan outlined how the company had developed the chatbot to provide faster, more personalised support as its customer base expanded.
“We’re a high-growth business, and growth creates a pretty obvious challenge,” he said.
“How do you continue to deliver brilliant, personalised customer experience and customer service as you scale, while at the same time making it easier, quicker for customers to get the help that they need?”
The technology enables customers to receive answers to straightforward queries, such as airport transfer times, by accessing their booking information and providing responses tailored to their holiday.
However, Callaghan acknowledged that encouraging customers to use the service had initially proved challenging.
“You can build something genuinely useful, and customers will just walk on straight past it,” he said.
When the chatbot was first introduced across key areas of the easyJet holidays website, including booking, contact and help pages, most customers continued to telephone the company instead.
The operator subsequently made the chatbot easier to find, clarified the types of enquiries it could handle and improved the personalisation of its responses.
These changes helped increase take-up, with the majority of in-destination customer contacts now starting through the chatbot.
Callaghan said the business had also focused on ensuring the technology could provide accurate and up-to-date information during incidents affecting holidaymakers.
During disruption such as wildfires, the chatbot can provide information based on live developments, while customers can be transferred to a member of staff by telephone or online chat when human judgement is required.
He stressed that building customer trust was just as important as the technology’s ability to answer questions.
Callaghan said the company had identified three essential elements to making AI successful: its ability to solve customer problems, customers’ willingness to use it and their confidence in the answers provided.
He added that businesses should focus on addressing genuine customer needs rather than introducing AI simply because the technology was available.
During the same Convention session, Newmarket Holidays chief executive Niel Alobaidi revealed that 97% of the operator’s employees were using AI on a weekly basis following a company-wide rollout of Claude.
Newmarket trialled three large language models over three months before staff voted for Claude, with every employee subsequently given access to an enterprise version.
Alobaidi said employees had been encouraged to use the technology for personal activities, including recipes and planning holidays, to help them become familiar with its capabilities.
He said 97% of employees were now creating at least one new chat each week.
Newmarket has also restructured its customer database to improve AI-assisted marketing and identify opportunities to make internal processes more efficient.
Meanwhile, World Travel Holdings UK managing director Lisa McAuley outlined how AI was being introduced across the business, including cruise pricing, package booking processes, marketing and employee onboarding.
She said the technology had helped the company launch a new corporate website in weeks rather than months, while eight of its 11 marketing employees were using AI daily.
However, McAuley cautioned that time savings did not automatically translate into financial benefits, stressing the importance of ensuring employees could put the time saved to productive use.
“We know that we’ve got positive adoption, but the stronger test is whether the work gets better and whether people can use the time they’ve saved to even better use,” she said.
McAuley added that businesses should involve employees in identifying opportunities for AI rather than introducing technology without first understanding the problems it was intended to solve.
The Travel Convention, October 12-14, in Funchal, Madeira
Full details here
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