AI to push India’s travel and tourism industry in the next decade: Sabre

A new flying experience: Artificial Intelligence (AI) will change the way people travel as compared to pre-pandemic levels, with travel at the business and global level becoming a more deliberate effort, according to a Sabre top official.

Garry Wiseman, Executive Vice President and Chief Product and Technology Officer of travel-tech system Sabre, spoke to Republic Business on creating customer-centric and personalised experiences in travel through emerging technologies.
 

At the backdrop of the Ram Mandir inauguration when religious tourism created a reviving spike in post-COVID travel, Wiseman said as a technology provider for reservation systems, Sabre is leveraging AI that “can help remove friction from travel by providing good technology.”

Statistically, India is a fast-growing nation home to over 1.4 billion people, having surpassed China as the world’s most populous nation as per the latest United Nation’s (UN) report.

The World Travel and Tourism Council’s Economic Impact Research also estimates India overtaking Germany as the world’s third biggest travel and tourism country.

“Particularly with India as we know, with the airlines that continue to expand, a variety of our customers (which are) some of the major airlines have ordered significant new numbers of airplanes to cope with this growing demand. From a SABRE perspective, there's really several places where we come into play to try and help travelers,” Wiseman said.

This is in line with a recent Sabre report which suggests that Indian carriers are expected to play a significant role in international travel.

Notably, with the middle-class segment expected to double from one in three to two in three Indians by 2047, travel is also set to become more accessible and affordable for this growing segment.

A Personalised Experience, courtesy AI

Source: Pexels

Wiseman said the use of AI will help speed up the development process and expedite the process of bringing products to market.

“A lot of airlines in particular are launching new digital experiences and constantly improving them and so the use of AI there to speed up the development process and to bring products to market quicker,” he said.

From a sales and customer-facing perspective, AI will continue to personalise the end-to-end journey of passengers.

“This means we'll start to see more personalisation come into play with the travel office,” he said.

But this will also mean self-help, or getting services themselves will become easier as AI engagement bots become better with generative technologies (GenAI).

Wiseman said this will result in lower costs for airlines, as GenAI models will be smarter and more interpretative of the latest data, such as flying information.

“On the servicing side, the amount of self-help is going to increase that customers can achieve through the enablement of these AI engagement bots. The generative AI models are going to be much more intelligent in terms of understanding the questions the customers are asking,” he said.

This will also enable wider-language support for customers, a move that helps multilingual nations like India.

Automating The Airline Experience

Source: Pexels
 

The physical check-in experience is also expected get easier, as airlines deploy facial recognition for enabling ticketless travel.

Dallas in the United States, Wiseman shared, is piloting AI on certain gates for the onboarding process wherein a person does not need a ticket to board the plane.

“Instead, it is a camera that recognises who you are and allows you to board the flight automatically.”

Back in India, the DigiYaatri by the Ministry of Civil Aviation is enabling the digital processing of passengers at airports, facilitating paperless travel and avoiding security checks at multiple points using facial recognition.

It also aids facilities such as entry point checks, entering into security checks, aircraft boarding as well as self-bag drop and check.  

“From an engagament perspective, the airlines, hoteliers as the car rental companies and platform providers as ourselves are very focused on seeing how we can measure the end-to-end experience for customers…because we want to make travels easy and  enjoyable as possible,” he said.

Retailing in Airlines

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For a passenger from their home to the destination they travel, the end-to-end journey of airlines is fragmented across taking a taxi, having a place to stay and doing events, which is a more complex experience than retail - Wiseman remarked.

“A lot of revolution and evolution had happened over the last 15 to 20 years to try and create personalised retailing experiences…starting with (your home) and going to the airport, you have to get a taxi or an Uber,” he noted.

Retail is involved in the in-travel experience, with airlines ramping up their plans to incorporate shopping for passengers on-the-go.

“The airlines are more and more talking about retailing. it's been a topic that started before COVID, but has really accelerated since COVID where customers are expecting more to be digitally enabled since the pandemic – where they wanted to have everything available on their phones,” he said.

This trend will benefit passengers across demographics - as airlines see more footfall and stretched travel experiences across economy and corporate travel.