Thomson teamed up with IBM to create a tool to help consumers “pick their perfect holiday”, with the holiday giant claiming it is one of the travel industry’s first chatbots, offering real-time and automated responses to holiday questions.

And the more people that “chat” to the assistant, the more it learns how to craft the perfect holiday, and how to offer more personalised recommendations, Thomson claims.

In the US another leisure app, Lola, is a new project from Kayak co-founder Paul English. Dubbed a “mobile travel agent”, and shorthand for longitude and latitude, it recently raised $33 million in extra funding and allows users to book hotels and flights through messaging real travel agents, while at the same time using artificial intelligence to make hotel recommendations.

However in the UK, FCM Travel is claiming it is the first travel management company to introduce chatbot technology with Sam (short for Smart Assistant for Mobile) for the business travel sector (pictured above at TTE).
 
Business blend
Aside from the pioneering claim, what exactly does Sam do? The company says the chatbot “blends artificial intelligence with the expertise of FCM consultants to deliver personalised, relevant information to business travellers’ mobile devices”.

It can supports users with all aspects of travel via a conversational interface to answer questions, make recommendations, and perform actions, FCM Travel continues.

"By 2020 we predict consumers will start feeling app fatigue and text or voice-based interfaces will be the new norm.”

The app helps business travellers pre, during and post-trip with everything from itinerary management, air and hotel bookings, flight updates, local information, weather and restaurant suggestions, to security notifications, ground transportation, driving directions, immigration advice and vaccination status.

In practical terms, the app will notify the user of the carousel number for collecting baggage after a traveller lands at the airport, for example, or ask if the user needs transport from the airport to their hotel.

However, Steve Norris, corporate managing director at Flight Centre, emphasises the app “does not replace the human touch entirely” as users “can call or message their consultant at any time for live assistance on the go”.

Sam was unveiled at last week’s Business Travel Show. Kelvin Kroll, chief information officer, Europe and Africa, of FCM’s parent company Flight Centre Travel Group, says: “The conversational interface and relevance of the messages or questions that Sam exchanges with the user, gives travellers their own ‘personal assistant’ on the move.

“Business travellers are already feeling the urge to use other consumer apps for booking flights and hotels, instead of their TMC… at the same time, the smartphone era is transitioning towards the conversation era, meaning the way consumers communicate with apps is moving to a message-based approach. By 2020 we predict consumers will start feeling app fatigue and text or voice-based interfaces will be the new norm.”

Thomson’s own research, meanwhile, chimes with this as following a recent poll, 77% of respondents said a “virtual travel agent would be useful when searching for a holiday”.

And Lola’s technology could, reportedly, be white-labelled, allowing other travel companies to add front-end artificial intelligence to their own systems.