Skift Take
Flight Centre has deployed several AI projects, but it’s just scratched the surface.
Flight Centre Travel Group has developed and deployed several AI projects, with dozens more in the pipeline.
It’s been almost a year since the travel agency said that it would be establishing a dedicated team to develop and implement AI tools throughout its corporate travel division.
Skift spoke with John Morhous, chief experience officer of Flight Centre’s corporate travel division, about the company’s progress. Morhous was behind the formation of the team, dubbed the “AI Centre of Excellence.”
“We spend a lot of time dealing with and tracking the [return on investment] for the time that we’re spending, and so far, we’re seeing a lot of positive ROI. So we’re continuing to invest in the area.”
Australia-based Flight Centre Travel Group is one of the world’s largest travel agencies. It sells leisure and business travel and completed $15.2 billion in sales in 2023.
How the AI Centre Works
The “AI Centre of Excellence” acts as sort of an internal consultancy for the company’s business travel brands, FCM and Corporate Traveller.
The team works with roughly a dozen various product teams, all based in different countries, to determine where generative AI could be useful. The team begins building the product and eventually hands it over to the respective product team.
The AI Centre is also in charge of developing AI best practices for the company around training, development, security, and dealing with government regulations — all sensitive areas especially for a publicly traded company. And it manages the AI relationships with partners like Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and OpenAI.
“Now the internal teams don’t need to worry about all that, as long as they work through the processes that we’ve outlined. They get all of that stuff as a bit of a package to them,” Morhous said. “And then [the AI team] can focus on driving innovation and then handing it over, then working on the next innovation.”
Four AI Projects at Flight Centre
The team develops some tools for consumer experience, but it’s mostly focused on making company operations more efficient, Morhous said.
They’re always working through new ideas. “They have capacity for about a dozen to two dozen at any given time. There’s constantly ones coming in constantly, one’s getting closed off,” Morhous said.
Morhous outlined four major projects that the team has deployed:
- Module that leverages OpenAI to classify all in-bound client inquiries and route them to the most relevant service team. “That’s been arguably the most impactful, highest [return on investment] deployment that we’ve had.”
- Browser extension tool that generates content during the booking process, meant to help clients offer tips to travelers. An example of the type of tip it could provide, Morhous said: “This European city has much higher tariffs on Uber. Please make sure you book a taxi when you arrive, as opposed to using an Uber.”
- Simplify a travel itinerary with bookings from multiple sources. Travelers can forward multiple bookings to an email address, and then the AI combines all the information and generates a schedule that the traveler can view in one place.
- Self-service customer service chatbot that clients can use instead of or before talking to a person.
What’s Next
Morhous believes there’s a lot more opportunity for AI in the travel industry, and it’s far away from realizing its full potential. For now, Flight Centre is focusing on big gaps between the travel’s many fragmented parts.
- “I would love to think travel works as fluidly as Amazon … where I can go on a website, buy something, and have it show up at my door four hours later. But travel is still a highly fragmented industry.”
- “I do think the technology has a ton of promise in the industry in general, and we’re probably just starting to scratch the surface.”
- “It’s not like I’m booking all my travel through a chatbot that knows everything, and everything I do now goes through those interfaces; it’s still very early days where we’re seeing the realistic impacts of that technology in the industry. But there’s a lot of promise. And I just think you’ve got to keep on focusing on trying to improve that experience and drive some positive ROI.”
- “We will probably continue to grow that team a little bit larger just to have a bit more capacity. I would imagine at some point they may start focusing on more specialized projects that are more AI-centric, as opposed to doing as much consulting.”
- “Our investment, whether it happens in a central team or happens in distributed teams, is not going down in the space.”
