Artificial intelligence assistant Swifty, a startup supported by Lufthansa Innovation Hub, is piloting conversational booking on Swiss International Air Lines' website.
The pilot, which will help Lufthansa Group gain insight for future AI-powered solutions, offers website users the option to book their flight using AI alongside traditional search.
Subscribe to our newsletter below
The natural language-focused AI solution starts with destination planning with users being provided tailored recommendations. From there, travelers are able to complete the booking and payment through a conversational chat or voice interface.
In an interview with PhocusWire at ITB Berlin earlier this month, Swifty CEO Stanislav Bondarenko said he sees chat interfaces such as WeChat as the future of travel booking.
"So customers don't have to go to a website or visit an app every time, they can simply — from an interface they like such as a calendar, WhatsApp or maybe Siri - get to the booking," he said.
"That's what we're trying to build and ideally the AI agent acts proactively so the user doesn't have to explicitly input their details."
He described the AI agent as a "headless OTA or virtual agent that connects users directly to the travel inventory" and the plan is for it to automatically act on user intent.
Swifty recently announced a deal with Japan's Line messenger service enabling users to book flights within the chat app.
The AI assistant gets its flight inventory through Travelport with Duffel acting as the aggregator and its hotels from Expedia.
The messaging element is being run on several AI platforms including OpenAI, Claude and Llama depending on the task being completed. There is a validation layer where the models check each other.
"There are hundreds of techniques implemented to make it accurate," Bondarenko said. "Before every release, we do 600 regression tests or more where Swifty talks to the model that imitates the user. They go through 600 different use cases like 'I want to travel with a family', 'I want to travel with a dog' or 'I need to go to Mars,' a use case that it wouldn't be able to fulfil. We try to make sure that we hit 100% on all of them but it's very hard with the models so we aim at 95% at the moment or higher."
Beyond Lufthansa Group, Swifty is helping travel agents make bookings more rapidly from email for two travel management companies in Germany. In addition, the startup is working with an undisclosed Nasdaq-listed online travel agency and also hopes to strike a deal for direct integration with one of the AI platforms for travel booking.