Transforming Travel: Expert Insights on the Power of AI-Driven Customer Experience

Catch Sutherland Sr VP & Global Head of Travel Hemal Shah’s exclusive take on the potential of AI to amplify the use of data-driven insights in creating unforgettable, personalized experiences.

Transforming Travel: Expert Insights on the Power of AI-Driven Customer Experience

Travel is at an inflection point. Soaring customer expectations and rapid technological advances are propelling travel companies to reimagine the entire experience. AI and its ever-evolving capabilities lie at the heart of this transformation, helping create personalized and streamlined journeys.

We spoke to Sutherland Sr VP and Global Head of Travel, Hemal Shah, about his views on trends shaping the industry. He also shared insights from a recent webinar alongside AWS exploring how leveraging AI, data, and analytics can transform travel and customer experiences. With him on the panel were:

  • Doug Gilbert, Sutherland Chief Information Officer and Chief Digital Officer,
  • Massimo G. Morin, Global Head of Travel at AWS for Travel and Hospitality
  • Moderator Adam Roark, Head of Customer Success for Travel at Sutherland

Here’s what he had to say. 

A Snapshot of AI and CX Right Now

Q: AI and customer experience in travel is a hot topic and everybody’s talking about it. What is the one thing that you see AI is already doing to improve CX?

A: Brands are rapidly realizing the untapped business value of AI. Advancing capabilities are helping travel brands streamline, personalize, and integrate experiences for travelers from planning to journey completion.

But AI is only as effective as the data feeding it. Travel providers have recognized this, leading to greater attention being paid to harnessing data from every stage of the customer journey, from multiple sources.

A classic example is collecting data at the time of shopping and point of sale, whether it is on their website or their mobile app. But that’s just one data point. In the webinar, we also talked about other examples, including during or after the trip, when leaving a review on social media or trying to claim a refund, using a chatbot or contact center.

A rich data foundation is just the first step. What comes next is just as crucial, and that’s connecting your platforms to integrate data no matter where it sits. This is key to unlocking valuable insights to craft customer engagement strategies led by AI-powered services.

There are brands that are already doing an excellent job of using those insights and harnessing their AI applications to deliver a better product experience in travel, whether that is knowing there is a baggage delay or disruption and proactively managing those situations to develop a better experience for customers.

Q: Some of the big players are already delivering data-driven hyper-personalized customer experiences in travel. But many companies are still in the initial stages of their data and personalization journeys. What do you think they need to know to get the foundation right and unlock its potential? What would you recommend?

A: There are several important considerations for brands that are starting their journey towards effectively harnessing data and unleashing its value.

Key to building a strong foundation is crafting a customer journey data strategy that clearly maps out each customer interaction point, and shows how that data is identified, collected, and brought together with data from other sources in order to create a 360-degree view of the customer.

Once brands have created this holistic view, they need to frame how these data-driven insights will drive customer interactions at different moments.

Transforming Travel: Expert Insights on the Power of AI-Driven Customer Experience

The bottom line: it is essential to have a plan that is tied to both business and customer success objectives in place.

Then, the next phase becomes implementing a comprehensive data management program. My colleague Naveen Mehta [Senior Vice President and Head of Europe at Sutherland] recently spoke about this in a podcast with SAS and CCW, and made valid points around how proper data governance holds the key to enabling rich, relevant, and accurate insights that drive personalized experiences and, more importantly, build trust with customers.

With a robust customer journey and data governance strategy established, it becomes exponentially easier to integrate sources of data and leverage meaningful insights that can be used to reimagine travel experiences.

Forecasting What the Future Holds

Q: Based on what you’re seeing and your own experience, where do you predict AI in CX is going to be in the next three to five years?

It’s clear travel companies will invest more deeply in AI and data capabilities over the next two to three years and that’s going to have ripple effects in the next five years. We will get better at leveraging AI across the entire customer journey.

So far, we’ve been talking about how brands will collect data from all of these transactions and interactions pre-trip, during, and post-trip. This data will then be layered up with an intelligent, connected AI engine so they can generate contextual, relevant insights. Then, those insights can be used to create and deliver an exceptional experience to the customer, and that’s where we will see the business benefits.

A great example, which we discussed on the webinar, is an airline providing cabin and in-flight crew access to customer experience data over the past five flights. So if, say, they had a delayed bag in their last flight, the cabin crew would know this information – and that would make it easier to deliver a personalized, positive experience.

As a case in point: top-tier airline members have received personalized letters and offers immediately following a disruption on a previous flight. Many carriers are also increasingly using that knowledge to drive customized up- and cross-sell opportunities around seat upgrades, priority boarding, and entertainment.

The way I see it, the brands using the technology to harness those targeted insights and give it to the individuals interacting with the customers will become industry leaders.

Q: During the webinar, you and the other guests offered your views of what the customer experience will be like in three to five years. But could you expand on it? How will it evolve in ten years?

A: That’s hard to predict. But what I’m sure of is that experience is going to be both intensely data-driven and tech-enabled, while also being human-centered. 

During the webinar and also in this recent interview in Authority Magazine, Doug Gilbert talked about using AI to augment human capabilities. I truly believe that the future of customer experience is in augmenting human capabilities with machine intelligence. AI can rapidly scan through, summarize, and synthesize vast tracts of information to provide key insights – around sentiment or behavior, for instance – that help humans focus on and solve complex tasks, issues, or challenges.

Using ‘Human-in-the-Loop’ training models, which combines advanced technological capabilities with human expertise and improves the learning of humans and AI at the same time, presents significant opportunities for travel brands to streamline, improve and customize experiences in the next decade.  

Q: Could you give us an example of AI and human intelligence in action and paint a scenario of what the travel experience of the future could look like?

A: Google recently announced it was adding smart travel planning capabilities to its Gemini Advanced AI model. By simply typing in your search inquiry to Google or the chatbot of your favorite provider, you will get back a personalized itinerary; for example, a hotel with a spa by the beach and golf course access. And as you’re typing, it will give you tailored options in real time.

Imagine being able to do that for an entire vacation for a family: purchasing door-to-door travel right from your home and back again, with everything in between organized according to your preferences and seamless processes enabled by technology.

But that’s just the beginning. Going back to what I said in the webinar, you won’t have to worry about security or immigration because of RFID tags and biometrics. Once you’ve boarded, you will be able to pick up in-flight entertainment from where you left off. On-ground transfers and transportation will automatically be able to accommodate travel schedules and unforeseen delays. And when you arrive at your hotel, your room will be allocated according to your preferences – right down to the type of pillow you like.

That’s also just from the passenger point-of-view. There are many other gains to be made by travel providers. We wrote a whitepaper on all the areas generative AI (Gen AI) can help airlines. In the webinar, Massimo also offered a great example of how Gen AI is helping agents read PNRs – saving up to two years of training.

In other words, AI will help the whole travel experience come together effortlessly.

Q: What other trends are you seeing that the industry will need to respond to?

A: An interesting trend is that customers are starting to look at more sustainable and experiential travel. This will become much more mainstream in the coming years, so travel brands are going to need to adapt and embrace AI-powered services that can help them provide this.

Investing Intelligently To Unlock Business Value

Q: Do you believe travel brands are making investments in the right places? Is it all about the technology?

A: I would say it’s about finding the right solution to address a specific business issue. So if there is a simple automation that can solve record keeping, or discriminative AI that can easily solve a particular challenge that company is facing, the organization should implement that before even thinking about advanced AI solutions such as Gen AI.

Discriminative AI models learn to distinguish between varying classes or types of existing data in a dataset, while Gen AI creates new content. Use cases for discriminative AI range from sentiment analysis to image classification and optical character recognition.

For example, one client wanted to upload printed PDF menus and images supplied by restaurant owners onto a centralized platform to be distributed to food delivery companies. They wanted automated extraction and classification, as well as translation in multiple languages for people ordering through apps. We used our Sutherland Extract platform; it uses discriminative AI mature technology to extract data from a PDF or an image or an HTML – in this case, to determine menu items, dietary information, and cost.

We also talked about some other examples that show how solutions customized to unique business needs can unlock new possibilities.

Take off With AI Today

It’s clear that the time to take the next step of the travel transformation journey is now. Catch up with the webinar to discover more critical insights from Hemal, Doug, and Massimo, and read our latest whitepaper to learn how to successfully create personalized, memorable travel experiences that deliver tangible outcomes.

Transform Travel With AI-Driven Customer Experience

Hemal Shah
Hemal Shah
Sr VP & Global Head Travel, Transportation, Hospitality and LogisticsLinkedIn Icon

Hemal is passionate about helping the Travel and Hospitality industry solve business challenges through technology-led Innovation.

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