Airlines pride themselves on service. Whether it's a budget, no-frills service or a top-tier national airline, carriers constantly compete on in-flight experience—from friendly flight attendants to quirky safety videos to luxurious first-class suites that only a tiny fraction of customers will ever experience. What's often overlooked, however, is the experience outside of the flight or airport.
The World Airline Awards (the world's largest independent customer satisfaction survey) exemplifies this narrow focus. Of their 50 survey areas, only two (airport website and online booking) address aspects beyond the airport or in-flight experience. The award for Best Airline Staff ignores thousands of contact center staff worldwide by focusing solely on frontline staff at airports or onboard. For the World's Best Airline category, they consider the in-flight magazine but not how easily you can reach someone to change your flight.
Recently, I was traveling on a two-week work trip to South East Asia. The flights transited through a hub city I'd never visited, so I'd planned to spend a couple of days on either side of the main trip exploring. I had a great time travelling then proceeded to the work conference. But as the trip progressed, I decided to return home early and began the challenging process of changing my flight.
My first step was finding the "manage booking" section on the website (I had to dig through my emails to find a link and booking reference). After too many clicks, I discovered that my fare type didn't allow changes via the website. I needed to contact them directly.
Beyond the typical millennial aversion to phone calls, I was traveling with a data-only SIM, so I knew any call would be costly. I searched for alternative contact methods and felt hopeful when I found a chat widget in the help center. But my excitement was short-lived—the widget was a new "AI-powered" chatbot that merely searched for help content, ultimately directing me to call or email.
Losing faith but still having time, I tried email. I asked simply: "Here is my booking reference, what are my options for flying a day earlier? How much will it cost?" After 24 hours, I received this response: "Please provide the exact date of your departure." Apparently, the agent couldn't look up details using the reference or understand what "a day earlier" meant. I immediately replied with my exact flight number and details.
The rest of the trip passed without response. While waiting for an internal flight, I tried the airport service desk in person. They claimed it was too difficult to look up my booking and suggested I call my home country's booking service. Being at a small regional airport, I gave them a pass. I had one final chance at a major airport two days before my flight home. This time they could access my details, but by then there were no available seats on the earlier flight.
I did eventually get a reply to my email—while waiting to board my originally scheduled flight. It was no help.
Clearly, this wasn't an ideal experience. While the outcome was frustrating but ultimately inconsequential for me, it's easy to imagine similar scenarios where delays and confusion have a much more serious impact.
The good news is that businesses now have the necessary tools and processes available to them to address these issues.
In a perfect world, I could have logged directly into the app or website to change my flight. This is what companies should strive for, though I understand the complexity and expense of designing and developing these experiences and system integrations.
If any industry should embrace multiple communication channels beyond telephone, it’s travel and hospitality. Phone access is limited, and many travelers use data-only SIM cards.
Messaging channels like web, in-app chat, or social messaging offer customers more choice. Digital voice capabilities can be integrated into apps or websites, providing phone-based service without international calls or expensive roaming charges.
People's schedules are busy and unpredictable. Nobody wants to wait in a phone queue—especially during a holiday. Customers should be able to respond and interact on their own time, not yours. Offering callback options for voice channels is common practice. While companies often think they're achieving this with web chat, most just replicate synchronous processes with live chat. Getting this right with web or in-app chat requires careful design and development—including new user interfaces and technical considerations like push notifications. Adding social channels like WhatsApp or Messenger simplifies this since customers already have these apps on their phones.
Email can effectively serve traveling customers—it's ubiquitous, accessible anywhere, and uses minimal data on roaming phones. But businesses often treat it as a low-cost, slow, legacy channel, resulting in outdated systems and glacial response times that would be viewed as unacceptable for voice or chat. We've seen businesses reduce email response times from days or weeks to minutes or hours by replacing shared inboxes and complex ticketing systems with modern intelligent routing used for voice channels.
Generative AI has made self-service chatbots easier and more effective. But an AI bot is only as good as its knowledge base and won't have all the answers. When that happens, customers shouldn't hit dead ends. The key is managing the transition from AI to human agents smoothly. Provide options and, just as with human-to-human transfers, don't make customers repeat themselves. Providing a seamless customer experience is key.
Airlines naturally serve customers from various countries and cultures—creating additional challenges for contact centers. Ensuring customers connect with agents who understand them is difficult. It complicates customer journeys and increases costs as businesses maintain multilingual staff. Fortunately, Generative AI can assist here too. Automatically detecting languages for routing or translating messages is now not only possible but highly effective and accessible. Surprisingly, Generative AI often understands cultural nuance better than non-native speaking human agents.
Today's travelers are increasingly mobile, tech-savvy, and expect service on their terms. They often travel with limited phone access, rely heavily on data connections, and need to manage their trips across different time zones and languages. This creates both challenges and opportunities for airlines and travel companies.
The tools and technology now exist to provide seamless, multi-channel customer service that matches these modern travel patterns. Companies that embrace these capabilities—from AI-powered translation to asynchronous messaging—will not only improve customer satisfaction but also reduce operational costs and complexity.
The key is to remember that the customer journey extends far beyond the flight itself, and service needs to be available wherever and whenever the customer needs it.
