AI Chatbots in Travel: Benefits & Examples

The evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has forever transformed the idea of the humble chatbot. What was once a limited tool designed to field basic prompt-based questions is now a comprehensive self-service solution that can engage in fluid conversations with users to provide instant, personalized customer support. 

Offering 24/7 assistance that ranges from answering questions to finalizing bookings, an AI chat agent can slash costs in your business and help you better serve your customers even as you scale. 

In this guide, we’ll explore the value of bringing AI-powered chatbots to your travel business, demonstrating how you can save time and money across the core customer service processes representing the most significant time burdens in the travel industry. 

If you’re interested in getting ahead of your competitors and providing a better self-service experience to your customers, read on to learn more…

What Is a Travel AI Chatbot?

For the purposes of this guide, an ‘AI Chatbot’ refers to a live AI agent that a customer can interact with via voice or text. This represents a significant departure from older chatbots, which describe a chat tool usually solely capable of limited text-based interactions. 

AI Agents aren’t fixed to a specific interface like traditional ‘chatbots’, which means your customers can interact via their preferred digital channel. Cognigy.AI, for example, builds AI Agents that are accessible across 30+ digital channels such as WhatsApp, Telegram, TikTok, Instagram, and many more of your customers’ preferred apps. 

These features combined essentially mean that an AI chatbot in the travel sector is simply an AI Agent that users can interact with digitally to ask questions, accomplish basic tasks such as changing account information, and even resolve more complex interactions such as booking a flight and processing the payment – all in a frictionless conversation between the customer and your automated chatbot. 

How Are AI Chatbots Changing the Travel Industry?

AI chatbots will play a vital role in the travel industry over the next decade. Not only do they help enhance customer service, personalize experiences, and streamline operations, but they also combat one of the biggest challenges self-service technology faces (keep reading to learn what that is!)

To give you a broad idea of how AI chatbots can shape the industry, here are some key ways they will reshape customer habits:  

1. Transforms wait time expectations: AI chatbots offer instant, round-the-clock support for common queries, booking changes, and travel information. This means customers can get support outside of office hours and accomplish tasks when it suits them most. 
2. Changes the perception of ‘chatbot’ conversation: Customers want to be able to talk freely with a chatbot and expect it to meet their needs, but pre-AI technology was rigid and often only allowed specific prompts or inputs. Conversational AI utilizes Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to create chatbots that engage in natural conversation. 
3. Supports genuine omnichannel needs: Modern travel customers use lots of different devices, apps, social media channels, and instant messaging platforms in their daily lives. An AI Agent is not tied to any single platform, so customers can interact with it however they prefer – from sending text queries via social messaging apps like WhatsApp to picking up the phone for a voice call. 

In terms of the problem we mentioned above, research shows self-service is stagnating because users often encounter errors when trying to accomplish tasks. In this study, 70% of customers reported that on at least one occasion in the past year, self-service had failed to resolve their issue, and they had to resort to human assistance. 

Many of these errors come down to the limitations of Pre-AI chat technology. Now, however, the travel sector can implement AI Agents to reduce this error rate and increase customer confidence in self-service. With Natural Language Understanding and Generative AI to help create context-relevant responses on the fly, an AI Agent can competently respond to users even if they go off-topic or use unexpected terms. 

Benefits of Travel AI Chatbots

AI chatbots provide compelling benefits to your customers and your business on an operational level. By introducing an instant, flexible customer service option that automates a vast majority of basic tasks, you can quickly reduce the manual burden of calls, save time across your organization, and improve customer satisfaction across the board.

Improves Customer Service 

AI chatbots significantly reduce wait times, resolve issues faster, and improve customer satisfaction in the travel sector. They provide 24/7 support, enabling travelers to interact whenever convenient, whether it's booking a last-minute flight or checking into a hotel late at night. 

Users can engage with chatbots through their preferred devices and receive instant assistance without needing to wait for human agents – which means less friction, faster resolutions, and happier customers.

Simplifies Mundane Tasks

The most important role of any self-service tool is to reduce the manual ‘chore’ associated with mundane, easily repeatable tasks. AI chatbots give customers the power to change account information, query basic information, and complete identity checks/submit verification without having to talk to a human agent. 

This automation means customers and your existing service team no longer have to waste valuable time in every interaction and can instead focus on more complex problems. 

Personalizes Customer Experiences

Conversational AI analyzes user data, recognizes intent, and detects patterns to offer personalized travel recommendations. Whether it's suggesting relevant destinations, accommodations, or activities, AI chatbots can tailor suggestions to meet individual preferences. 

With CAI technology, you can create chatbots that go beyond generic travel advice, offering personalized itineraries and sending reminders for important moments such as flight times and check-in windows.

Provides Proactive Engagement

Change happens quickly in the travel sector, where a customer’s proposed booking can change at the drop of a hat, whether that’s due to personal circumstances or unforeseen events like storms, political instability, etc. An AI Agent can reach out to a customer and inform them of these changes and then, crucially, support them in amending the trip or booking an alternative. 

Not only does this help keep customers happy, but it also helps your business protect revenue and improve the chances of future retention. 

Improves Accessibility

AI chatbots support customers speaking in their native tongue and can translate accordingly, meaning all of your customers can receive support in their language. Chatbots also offer access across multiple devices and platforms, including websites, mobile apps, and social media, making your business as accessible as possible to customers using their chosen methods. 

What Are the Pain Points of Travel AI Chatbots?

Hallucinations

AI that isn’t trained for a specific purpose and is used more generally can be prone to hallucinations, where it presents false information as fact. In the travel sector, this could cause lots of issues for customers – especially if your chatbot is involved with planning/organizing trips. 

To minimize the risk of hallucination, you need to work with a specialist AI provider to build a chatbot that combines Generative AI with Conversational AI. This gives the chatbot the ability to understand a user’s query better and create more tailored responses, which reduces the risk of generic hallucination. 

Your AI provider should also tailor the AI Agent by training it using data relevant to your industry, which gives it more accuracy in responding to industry-specific requests. For example, Cognigy.AI can deliver AI Agents pre-trained in the airline sector, allowing chatbots to naturally understand unique concepts like airport codes. 

Integrations

Any traditional ‘chatbot’ is limited by how it can be integrated with your existing systems. If, for example, you want a chatbot to facilitate a booking process, it needs to be able to access your entire booking tech stack. 

For airlines and travel companies, integrations can be messy – especially given the complexity of third-party booking systems, global distribution networks (GDS), and payment processing platforms.

Before adopting any AI, you’ll need to sit down with your technology team to get a complete understanding of which processes utilize which integrations. Once you’ve mapped these out, you’ll be able to give your AI provider better context for them to build a chatbot that takes full advantage of all your key systems via integration to deliver the best experience for customers. offers the integrations you need. 

Human Interaction

83% of travelers who use self-service chatbots still want to be able to speak to a support agent seamlessly without having to repeat themselves. This makes it clear that you can’t just replace your human agents with chatbot technology – people still want to talk to people.

An AI Agent provides a great balance between automated support for basic tasks and more effective human intervention for complex processes. With Conversational AI, the chatbot can recognize when a user’s case needs human involvement and can then route the call to your agents. 

Crucially, this takes away a customer's pain point of having to repeat themselves. The AI Agent will have already completed basic tasks like identity checks and will then provide full context to your human support team, so they’ll be equipped to handle the call immediately and won’t have to ask for older details or complete identity checks. 

Use Cases of Travel AI Chatbots

AI offers so much versatility, meaning AI chatbots go far beyond the previous limitations of chatbot technology and have a much broader scope for how they are used in your business. Here are some clear examples of the best use cases for travel brands. 

Identification, Verification & Documentation

Perhaps the clearest use case for all businesses in travel is in using AI Agents to automate the identification and verification steps that happen in almost every case. These processes are usually low complexity and represent a huge burden in terms of time for both the customer and your team. 

An AI Agent can guide a user through every stage of verification, from collecting initial details to asking them to upload supporting documentation such as a photograph of their passport. Once completed, the agent can then connect the user to a human who no longer has to take these laborious steps and can focus on solving the case.

Customer FAQ Chatbot

A simple but effective use case for AI Agents in travel comes in the form of an FAQ-style chatbot that allows customers to ask questions via text or voice. An AI Agent using Knowledge AI can understand complex queries and dynamically generate the appropriate answer. It can also provide additional context to customers, such as informing them of local rules in their destination country.

With an AI Agent helping resolve these queries, your customers will get the answers they need in a way that feels empathetic and personal. They don’t need to wait on hold or trawl an FAQ page for answers – they can get them instantly using their preferred channel. 

Manage My Booking/Account

Travel businesses are inundated with queries about a user’s existing booking/account – many of which represent low-value, low-complexity requests such as changing personal information. These requests present ideal use cases for self-service automation, with AI Agents capable of handling the vast majority of these needs and then requesting human intervention when required. 

Click here to see how Frontier Airlines worked with Cognigy.AI to build a support bot that could engage in hundreds of thousands of conversations at once to dramatically reduce the burden of basic customer requests on the human service team. 

Pro-Active Customer Engagement

The travel sector faces regular disruptions that can impact your customers’ travel plans. When this happens, you need to contact customers and either process refunds or rebook the flight/trip. In some cases, when an event disrupts a large portion of your customer base, this could result in hundreds of hours of call time for your human agents. 

An AI Agent can automate this process and instantly reach out to customers at once. Not only will it notify them of the changes, but it can also provide options and allow them to ask further questions, minimizing frustration and ideally guiding them to rebook the trip rather than simply cancel and refund. 

Self-Service Booking Tool

For most travel businesses, the booking process is absolutely vital to success. Successfully drawing customers along this process to complete a booking usually involves multiple teams and significant effort in terms of time and money. 

Though most businesses prefer to retain human agents in the final step of the booking journey, the advancement of AI technology now makes it possible to create an end-to-end chatbot to handle the booking process. 

A customer could, for example, ask the chatbot to suggest flights based on their preferred dates. The bot can retrieve the appropriate options and then field any additional questions a customer might have. Once satisfied, it can then complete the booking process and facilitate payment. For a customer, this means they no longer have to navigate between multiple screens or sites and can book, amend, or cancel their travel plans in one place. 

Examples of AI Chatbots in Travel

Want to see how a real-world travel brand utilizes an AI solution to serve its customers better? Here’s a fantastic example from one of the world’s most exciting airlines…

Lufthansa Implements AI Assistance To Resolve Customer Chaos

AI proved pivotal for Germany’s biggest airline, the Lufthansa Group. After the travel disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, passengers began flooding support channels looking for help. This quickly overwhelmed their existing in-house chatbot and sent call volumes to unmanageable levels. 

Lufthansa identified AI as a cost-effective method for dealing with the dramatic increase in the volume and complexity of customer calls. Working with Cognigy, Lufthansa developed multilingual AI Agents that could field customer questions and carry out important self-service tasks. 

The impact was immediate, giving Lufthansa the capacity to confidently handle a huge increase in support cases – with the AI Agent handling as many as 375,000 daily interactions at peak times and 16 million conversations through the year. 

Like Lufthansa, you might have already developed a chatbot or similar support tool that is no longer sufficient. Click here to read the case study in full to see how adopting AI can help you evolve your customer service options. 

Just to be clear: that’s 16 million conversations that would otherwise have needed a human agent to answer the phone, talk to the customer, gather any relevant information, and then resolve the query. With that in mind, the time and cost savings associated with adopting an AI Agent are truly staggering. 

Best Practices for AI Chatbots in Travel

If you’re now more interested in exploring AI implementation in your own business, here are some best practices to bear in mind. 

Start With Clear Use Cases

As we’ve demonstrated in this guide, AI Agents can accomplish a vast range of self-service tasks and fulfill many different roles. You should, however, start with a narrow use case that represents low complexity and high volume. Once you deploy the AI Agent, you can start monitoring performance and adapting it to other use cases based on real-world data.

Remember Your Customer 

It’s easy to get excited about the time and money an AI chatbot can save your business – but it’s vital you remember the needs of your customers. Design the chatbot to be user-friendly, intuitive, and capable of understanding natural language. Ensure it can handle typical travel-related tasks such as booking changes, flight status updates, and travel information conversationally.

Plan For Human Intervention

As mentioned earlier, even the best self-service processes sometimes require human intervention. Make sure your AI chatbot has clear rules for when (and how) it involves a human agent. You’ll also need to train your customer service teams on how the chatbot operates and what impact it will have on their work processes. 

Cognigy Can Implement an AI Chatbot Solution for the Travel Sector

Working with some of the world’s biggest airlines and travel management providers, Cognigy has developed innovative AI Agents to revolutionize customer service in the travel sector. Book a demo with our team today to see how we can help you. 

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is the Difference Between a Chatbot and Conversational AI?

Chatbots are limited, rule-based systems designed to support simple interactions. Conversational AI is capable of understanding and engaging in dynamic conversations, adapting to user needs, and carrying out complex tasks. 

How Does an AI Chatbot Improve Customer Experience in Travel?

As we’ve discussed in this guide, AI chatbots improve customer experience in the travel sector by allowing users to carry out key self-service tasks. From asking basic questions about travel to managing their account or even booking a new trip, AI chatbots provide instant support on whatever devices and channels your users favor.