Online travel services are big business. Last year they netted $600 billion, and by the end of the decade, they will be worth closer to $1 trillion annually. That kind of value does not come about by chance. It involves turning very complex markets — with countless variables of price, availability, and timing — into seamless products and processes that customers are able to use without being aware of the specifics of the underlying technology.
For many airlines, hotel operators, and rail and car rental companies, Sabre is the business behind the business. The company, which works with more than 400 airlines and 50,000 travel agencies, is the source of much of the technology that makes global travel seamless, from booking one flight that connects with another, to adding in hotel reservations, tour bookings, rail travel, or car rental — and doing it all online in just a few clicks.
Behind the scenes, Sabre’s constant search for the latest technologies to innovate in travel and enhance customer satisfaction means a big focus on research and development. Keeping pace with technological advances — especially since the explosion of generative artificial intelligence (AI) — is crucial to staying ahead of the competition.
Collaboration in the genes
Infosys has been working with Sabre for the last five years, essentially as an extension of its product teams, and often in intensive collaborative sprints involving multiple providers and a broad spectrum of software skills.
For Sabre, this is a natural way of working, because collaboration is how it began. The company was formed following a chance meeting on a plane between the president of American Airlines and an engineer from another company. The pair quickly realized that an existing message management system could be used to automate the airline’s booking system, speeding it up and reducing the amount of manual work required.
Imagine, test, develop.
The emergence of generative AI is accelerating Sabre’s product development process and changing it for the better. It is enabling product teams to move more rapidly through the process of designing, developing, and testing use cases, which helps Sabre keep abreast of travel trends and differentiate itself in the market.
Collaboration with technology partners has been an integral part of this process. At a recent generative AI hackathon, for example, developers from Sabre, Google Cloud, and Infosys gathered in Texas to apply AI to real-life business problems. This two-day sprint packed a lot into 48 hours. Its mission was to find ways to use the technology to reduce operational costs and increase customer satisfaction by developing cutting-edge support solutions.
One project looked at automating email responses to inbound travel queries. While generating a generic email response is straightforward, creating one that is relevant and accurate for a unique query is another matter. But an auto-response that returns informative detail as well as available offers not only ensures a high likelihood of customer satisfaction but also reduces processing time. This means routine queries can be answered faster, with human agents freed up to focus on more complex tasks.
To achieve this, Infosys worked primarily with Google’s Vertex AI tool, a machine-learning and generative AI platform, using application programming interface (API) requests to transform the unstructured information in the original email into structured trip bookings by generating valid travel offers for air travel, hotels, and other booking components. The resulting proof of concept speeds up and refines the response process, enabling more queries to be answered without additional resources while lowering costs and streamlining support processes. It also provides richer insights into customer behavior and preferences.
Push the boundaries
A related task was to develop a chatbot that could accurately process and respond to a wide range of customer queries 24/7, reducing the need for human intervention. The Infosys team researched multiple generative AI approaches and used a range of Google tools such as Dialogflow (a natural language interpretation platform), Gemini (a generative AI assistant and family of large language models), Agent Builder (which develops automated agents), and Vertex AI. Creating sophisticated chatbots that provide immediate assistance and automate routine tasks, while still satisfying demanding customers with highly relevant and accurate answers, is vital to reducing costly human interventions.
The hackathon was intended to push the boundaries of AI in real-world business applications, using talented partners to create transformative and industry-leading solutions that enhance customer satisfaction while increasing revenue and reducing costs.
Sabre is a powerful advocate for the value of partnership. It will continue exploring opportunities to collaborate with industry leaders such as Infosys to harness the potential of generative AI techniques, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to solve the most complex challenges in travel.
Read More from This Article: Hacking the future of travel for Sabre
Source: News