Oneworld Builds AI Flight Booking Tool with Google and Former IBM Exec

Oneworld Alliance said Thursday that it has been piloting a generative AI tool meant to help users book multi-city trips. 

The tool was built on Google Cloud’s infrastructure and is powered by the AI platform from Elemental Cognition, which was founded by IBM Watson inventor David Ferrucci. 

Oneworld represents 13 airlines, including American Airlines, British Airways, Japan Airlines, and Qatar Airways. Oman Air and Fiji Airways are set to join. 

The tool was built to streamline the booking process of Oneworld’s Round the World offering, an air travel package that includes up to 16 journeys between cities on at least three continents. The trip starts at the home city and goes either west or east around the globe, ending at the home city in up to a year.

Itineraries involving multiple airlines are challenging to design for various reasons, like fluctuating flight availability and complex booking rules for the travel package. 

Oneworld wanted to find a way to ease the cumbersome process and make more sales, said Roger Blackburn, Oneworld vice president for Europe.

“For Round the World passengers, they are sometimes booking trips of a lifetime,” Blackburn said. “But they maybe don’t have a great idea how they stitch that into a coherent journey around the world that works on the Oneworld network and comes in at a fare they can afford, and they really need a helping hand to help them get through that process. We’re trying to do that with a tool that is easy to use online.”

In the future, this could expand to include more legs of the journey, like finding hotels or determining which airport is most convenient.

“This is not the only difficult travel problem. It’s a particularly difficult travel problem. But there’s complexities around things beyond the airline journey,” Blackburn said. “For us it’s a starting point to try and do some other things, perhaps with with what we can offer our passengers.”

The tool includes a chatbot that users can interact with in natural language, starting by indicating the home city, destinations, and dates of travel. The tool then analyzes the best route for the itinerary and works with the user to troubleshoot any issues, like if there is no availability for certain flights. Besides the chatbot, users manually select cities and dates and then lets the AI do the hard work of finding the flights. 

Even using the tool during the brief Skift test, it’s clear that the process is time-consuming. But after a relatively painless back-and-forth with the chatbot — which likely would have taken far longer manually — the tool finalized a 175-day trip to eight cities on three continents for a total of $4,560. 

During a pilot over the past 18 months, those who have used the new tool have been five times more likely to complete a sale, Blackburn said. About 10% of traffic comes through the new tool. 

The user may prefer the traditional booking option for a short trip or if they already know what they want, but the new tool can be especially useful for those who are still exploring, he said.

“We find a proportion of our customers don’t know what they want, and they need a lot of help. So we have this as an alternative path for them,” Blackburn said. “We find it’s much more effective than the standard tool at getting people through to a successful itinerary.”