Can an algorithm possibly know better than you what you want to do during your journey? This question is no longer rhetorical, thanks to the rapidly evolving world of online air ticketing, and it is shaping up to be one of the key aspects of what airspace will look like in the years that follow. Given that more than 70% of air ticketing activities are carried out online today, the aviation industry is increasingly turning to state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and strong transaction technology.
The heart of all this is artificial intelligence. The new booking engines are no longer just passive search engines; they have become active recommendation engines. Artificial intelligence powers all these new recommendation engines. Combined with explicit data such as booking history and loyalty program membership information, implicit data such as mouse clicks and filter options can be employed by AI engines to infer and recommend relevant travel options in real time. Hybrid recommendation approaches can circumvent the “cold start” issue in new customers and also enhance recommendations provided to regular travelers. Airlines are heading towards “hyper-segmentation” and segment of one targeting passengers’ habits and occupations.
More personalization in this expansion of capabilities will be done through intelligent assistants. Generative AI chatbots, for instance in Trip.com’s TripGenie, have already seen their order conversion rates double through planning and fare suggestions. These assistants, used through messaging platforms including WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, have the ability to recall conversations and hand over conversations to human customer service if a traveler requires assistance.
Another area of painful necessity for travelers is, of course, price, and this has particularly seen an AI transformation for the better. Right from airlines to Online Travel Agencies, pricing strategies changed from static to dynamic yield management strategies, wherein prices changed for several different times of the day depending on real-time market conditions and what others were charging and booking history and so on and so forth. Systems began to use RightRez Revenue Management to immediately start searching for prices and automatically start optimized rebooking whenever better rates were available elsewhere. This is no price monitoring but is rather predictive price intelligence to advise the traveler to take their pick of purchasing in order to save more and regret less.
Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that these advanced algorithms also give rise to “surveillance pricing.” As Noah Giansiracusa, a mathematician, suggests, travel companies now possess enough information about an individual’s location, browsing behavior, and even phone battery life to guesstimate a user’s ‘pain point’ in order to charge a price accordingly. Although these techniques could enable smart pricing decisions, their potential of being viewed as exploitation will discourage consumers. It’s a challenge for the industry to ensure that privacy meets transparency concerning how consumer data affects travel prices.
The other side of trust within the context of online booking is security. At this current rate of rising cases of cyber crime, blockchain has proven to be one of the most efficient ways to guard against this. The fact that most of the transactions are in a decentralized format for blocks, with cryptographic authentication built right into them, works to prevent fraud and also protects customer information, ensuring that all is above board. Companies that have incorporated blockchain in this process are more secured.
Mobile operating systems make these developments better and better. As smartphones become the primary tool for arranging travel arrangements overall, mobile platforms for air carriers are going to become steadily more central to managing an entire journey. Improved mobile user experience design based on responsive design and frequent updates will make booking and check-in processes smooth and intuitive within one and the same system. The less clicks, the better.
However, sustainability is also revealing itself to be a consideration in booking. The emissions of CO₂ are displayed in Google Flights for each route, and the choice is thus radically constrained for the emissions-conscious traveler. It has recently been revealed in a study that a staggering 42% of recreational travelers belong to this group-and some are willing to shell out a heck of a lot more cash for the environmentally friendlier option. The answer to all these changes is the must-have infrastructure-big data.
The ETL process pulls, transforms, and loads massive amounts of travel-related information from GDS to the most minute level of IoT-sensor-level information into scalable data management systems. Realtime streaming platforms, based on the likes of Apache Kafka, make sure the personalization engines get their freshest possible high-quality latest-level information precisely at the time of the booking. The predictive models based off all the above are not only improving recommendations but are also improving the overall efficiency of the operation level right from route optimization to all forms of disruption management.
The bottom line for the regular traveler who’s presumably tech-savvy and the professional? The future for booking a flight lies not in getting a seat on a plane. It lies in having fun with a smart, safe, responsive, value-aligned ecosystem way before the buyer actually expresses them.
