The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Meet your new data-driven travel agent service
Unlike big, impersonal online agencies, the best travel agents know a great deal about their clients and their travel choices. Now several new travel companies are creating data-driven, automated agents that rely on users’ personal preferences to make the travel-planning process easier.
Whether they use human knowledge or artificial intelligence (or both), these nextgeneration travel agents do the search-culling for you, tailoring the results to your stated preferences and potentially cutting down on web-browsing time. They also use text messaging as their primary communications mode, often via a chatbot, a computer program designed to converse in text.
“Rather than going into an online travel agency and doing a search and seeing a list of 150 hotels, you enter in your profile what you’re looking for and a chatbot serves up a curated list of three to four in a messaging interface,” said Douglas Quinby, a senior vice president at the travel research firm Phocuswright. “The ideal is fewer options more tailored to your request.”
Most of these services are challenging the do-ityourself system of browsing as offered by services like Expedia. New-wave agents — human, robotic or a combination — will also allow users to continue a search over time, rather than start anew with a browser each session.
“This is very much the early alpha stage of all of this,” said Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst and the president of Atmosphere Research Group. “It’s very much the first wave, which is exciting, but the use of artificial intelligence is far from established and also, frankly, far from perfect.”
The following pioneers are tinkering with the way travel is planned and booked, with payment models that vary from subscriptions to payper-use.
Membership services
Using a blend of technology and human interaction, Pana caters to frequent travelers, charging $49 a month for its services, available around the clock. Computer programs funnel requests and member profiles, including past trips, to human agents who text back.
“Pana was borne out of two pain points,” said Devon Tivona, its chief executive. “First, all the technology pulled me away from just emailing to get something done because I’ve become my own travel agent. Second is getting access to realtime help.”
On the human end of the neo-agency spectrum, Savanti Travel tends to its clients’ plans as the founders, Dan Lack and Leigh Rowan, said they do their own, with an eye to saving money and maximizing loyalty programs.
“It’s our strategy, not just a computer’s,” said Rowan, describing the service as managing airline and hotel bookings not just to travel cheaply but to accrue status with travel companies. “The downside of working with us is the onboarding is intense. We get to know you as a human, not just a set of data points.”
Membership fees start at $1,000 a month for unlimited travel planning, which they say eliminates the conflict of interest inherent in a commission-based system, where revenue rises with more expensive bookings. They recommend status-conferring credit cards and help manage the programs to use points for free travel.
“We sit at the intersection of hustle and hospitality,” Lack said. “We’re oldschool hospitality and newschool intelligence.”
On-demand services
More accessible to casual travelers, free travel planning services, like bricksand-mortar travel agencies, make their money through commissions.
Originally launched in 2015 as a personal assistant tackling tasks from shopping to travel booking, Mezi shifted to handling travel exclusively last year. The company’s chief executive, Swapnil Shinde, who is also a founder, said its chatbots handle most transactions in five or fewer messages. In complex cases that robots cannot handle, human agents act as troubleshooters who, after solving problems, train the bots in that resolution. “We’ve built it so that every morning it’s smarter than the previous night,” he said.
The more travelers use Mezi, the more it knows about their preferences, making it likely that Mezi will suggest a boutique hotel in a museum district for those who have shown an interest in design and art.
The online agency Hipmunk operates Hello Hipmunk, a free messaging system for travel planning using Facebook Messenger, Skype or Slack that can start with a flight request, wander into a conversation about hotels and resume flight bookings in a style that mimics human conversations.
“This is in a sense going back to the future,” said Adam Goldstein, the chief executive of Hipmunk. “We’re talking about doing things that you could have done or could today do with a travel agent, except this travel agent is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
One entertaining aspect of Hello Hipmunk is probing it for planning tips, asking questions like what’s the cheapest week to travel in October and where can I fly direct to the tropics from Chicago in February?
Expedia now offers messaging-based searches and bookings on Facebook Messenger, Skype and other platforms. Its goal is to provide more creative advice to customers.
“We’re supporting hotel changes and flight cancellations through the bot, but the longer-term goal, and it’s aspirational, is to have a conversation about what to do when it’s raining in Hawaii,” said Dave Fleischman, the vice president of global product for Expedia.
Flightfox, which books airfares only, works differently. Founded in 2012, it originally tried to crowdsource flight savings by distributing requests to freelance bookers who would compete to find the best fare for a fee.
“It was nice in theory, but we realized we needed someone to be responsible for your trip,” said Todd Sullivan, a founder.
Now, users submit a flight request, and Flightfox’s network of agents takes on the booking task, usually for a $50 fee, though it can go to $100 or more for complicated itineraries. The agency specializes in knowing the ins and outs of points systems to maximize value, especially for business-class flights or complex itineraries.
Instead of booking the trip for you, agents provide links for self-booking to maintain transparency about costs and to avoid collecting personal information like passport numbers.
Free-and-fee hybrid
Entirely powered by chatbots, HelloGbye introduced its app in March, offering both a free service for booking hotels and flights and a $19-a-month subscription that offers preferred hotel rates, 2 percent cash back on hotel bookings and no change fees on itineraries.
“It’s like the Costco model,” said Greg Apple, the marketing chief for HelloGbye, which targets frequent and business travelers. “You get savings in bulk and if you spend a lot you get a check back at the year end.”