Flight Centre using AI to understand customer sentiment and increase spending

One of Australia’s oldest travel agencies has turned to AI as it rolls out 72-hour refunds across airlines and looks to increase the spending of its younger, online customers.

Flight Centre’s first major application of AI is being used to understand customer attitudes. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Tertius Pickard

One of Australia’s oldest travel agencies has turned to AI as it rolls out 72-hour refunds across airlines and looks to increase the spending of its younger, online customers.

Flight Centre said its new artificial intelligence partnership with Qualtrics would give the 42-year-old agency a new edge, as it uses AI to interpret and understand sentiment about the company and its services.

Its first major AI play uses the technology to try to understand what the publics thinks of the business and detect problems that need to be fixed.

It is an attempt to understand what can make the business more appealing to the online generation.

Flight Centre’s global managing director Andrew Stark said the company would not use social media as an avenue for refunds or to get problems solved.

“We’ve got a customer care team so we’re not seeing this as a silver bullet to give us an overall sentiment or solve individual problems, but it will give us the average sentiment of the market,” he said.

Mr Stark said that while AI might be helpful in the “dreaming phase” of a trip, most Flight Centre’s customers would rather deal with people.

“We still believe that human beings, especially in our world, play a critical role in ensuring a customer gets what they want,” he said. “More importantly, when things go wrong, (our customers) know they’ve got someone to call.”

That view was supported by the average amount customers were willing to pay for trips in store versus online.

“As the basket size gets more complex, becomes of greater value and has more components added to it, customers still want the human element or the human validation that they’re making the right choice,” Mr Stark said.

Flight Centre global managing director Andrew Stark.

In-store bookings accounted for 75 per cent of Flight Centre’s total trips. On average, customers who booked in store spent around $5500 on a trip whereas those who booked online spent about $1000.

“That gives you a good idea of when people are prepared to use technology,” he said.

The average in-store trip was 19 days and that was being booked by a lot of travellers in their 60s. Online, the average customer age was 42.

“There’s probably a moment in time between your 40s and your 70s where you have disposable income, you probably have the means to book larger top holidays and you spend more time travelling,” he said.

The company would continue to prioritise service in its 470 stores, and look to use AI and other technologies to help improve work in its back-end, to increase the online spending of younger travellers and further develop its capabilities.

Mr Stark said Flight Centre was already working towards fixing some customer pain points that AI had helped to identify, one of which was customers not being able to manage bookings.

“Work is in play right now to have that rolled up within the next six to 12 months where there will be a function in our app,” he said.

Customers would also soon be able to access a refund from certain carriers through the Flight Centre app within 72 hours.