Air India introduces eZ Booking, an AI-driven feature simplifying flight ticket reservations for Maharaja Club members | Representational Image
Mumbai: Now flyers will be able to book their flight tickets by just texting or talking to the artificial intelligence version of a travel agent about their detailed travel itinerary. Air India has rolled out an AI-driven feature eZ Booking whereby customers can complete their reservation on its website in fewer steps.
On Wednesday, Air India launched their latest ticket booking management feature which is expected to be convenient for passengers for booking their flight tickets. Currently available exclusively for members of Air India’s loyalty programme Maharaja Club, the innovation helps customersbook their ticket on the Air India website by eliminating a number of commands and without having to navigate multiple screens.
eZ Booking is powered by intelligent ‘Agentic AI’ tools and simulates the role of a travel agent by listening to the customer’s requirement and generating a customised itinerary. ‘Agentic AI’ helps users complete complex tasks with minimal human intervention utilising machine learning, natural language processing, and automation technologies to take decisive action.
The reservation journey on digital channels for airline customers involves navigation through multiple screens to enter travel details, make selections from available choices, feed in information about travellers, etc. before making the payment and getting the ticket. eZ Booking aims to streamline the process to fewer clicks and pages by eliminating multi-step navigation on the website.
Through eZ Booking, customers can express their travel needs in simple natural language just like they would convey their travel needs to a human travel agent. The eZ Booking would promptly provide a complete itinerary which the user can accept or modify if required and simply make the payment to get the ticket.
Flyers can also talk to eZ Booking instead of entering text, further simplifying the effort needed to convey the travel intention. If the passengers are not satisfied with the itinerary provided, they can easily change it with additional input on what needs to be modified through text or voice commands.
Dr. Satya Ramaswamy, Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Air India, said“This is an industry-leading initiative and we are taking early steps in deploying the emerging ‘Agentic AI’ capabilities across all our digital footprint. We hope our guests will enjoy the ease-of-use, speed and convenience of eZ Booking, that further enriches our strong digital channel presence.”
The patent-pending design concept for eZ Booking had won the ‘Red Dot Design Concepts’ award recently which is showcased in the Red Dot Design Museum in Singapore.
eZ Booking further enhances experience for Air India’s online customers by leveraging learnings from Air India’s innovative AI-driven chatbot ‘AI.g’, launched in May 2023. The global airline industry’s first generative AI chatbot, the AI.g has responded to over 7 million guest queries so far, answering 50,000 queries per day across multiple issues. It answers an impressive 97% of queries autonomously, with just 3% of the queries escalated to human agents.
