eDreams Odigeo taps AI to learn about customers and improve the experience

eDreams Odigeo talks up success of artificial intelligence to create a more personalized experience for travellers.

According to the company’s chief executive Dana Dunne, it has been applying AI techniques for about three years after seeing the work that an autonomous vehicle company was doing on the U.S. West Coast.

“We started hiring people and building it and we said everyone needs to look at this. Instead of coming up with ideas and asking permission we turned it on it’s head to say if you’re not doing this, you need to say why not.”

AI, as well as reinforcement learning, are being employed in different areas across the company such as customer relationship marketing and pay-per-click campaigns for its brands.

It also says it makes eight billion predictions daily using AI to make recommendations to travellers and personalize the online experience.

The company says these AI and machine learning techniques have already enabled the company to reduce the time it takes to return flight results by 88%.

Shravan Kochhar, director of strategic insights for eDreams Odigeo says: “AI allows us to understand at scale what our customers really want.

"We have deployed a network of algorithms which process in real time large amounts of data to better understand what they want and personalize the experience they are going through.”

AI prowess

A further example provided is when customers do searches for various dates, the company can anticipate and offer alternatives results, with more than 80% accuracy. 

Dunne says that depending on the channel and the country, search results can be tailored to a customer’s history e.g. whether they had been interested in ancillaries in the past.

eDreams Odigeo has drawn from the insight it gleans from its sites as well as insight from its user experience lab, which brings in 1100 users every quarter, and external research to come up with what drives travellers to take a trip.

The Meaningful Journey research reveals that 23% of travellers are pleasure seeking, 23% are looking for a personal connection through friends and family, 15% seek uniqueness, 14% a sense of belonging, 13% want to chill and relax and 12% want a different routine but where every detail is planned.

Although this might seem like a departure from previous messaging from the company, Dunne says it has not really communicated much what it is trying to do.

“We really are focused on marrying two things together. We really want to lead with the technology and really want to understand the customers and what they want and merge the two together to provide a great experience that differentiates us from our competitors.”