The news. Travel Weekly reports that UK travel technology provider Travelgenix has brought five tools together under its Luna brand for independent agents. They cover marketing, website enquiries, customer records, loading contracted products, and a branded app for travellers.
Chief executive Andy Speight's line is the one worth keeping: "The value of AI to a travel business is what it helps the team get done." He says the aim is to give agents more time for the customers who need their advice.
The details are modest, and that is why they are interesting. The marketing tool drafts posts and emails that staff can review, change or remove. The chat tool answers from approved business information and hands over with the conversation history attached. The contracting tool reads rate sheets, scanned supplier documents and spreadsheets, and staff check the pricing and margins before anything goes on sale.
Look at where the human sits
Most AI announcements in travel describe the moment the traveller talks to a machine. This one describes a person checking a rate sheet. I am not judging the product here, because I have not tried it and neither has the report. But as a way of describing the work, it is honest about who is still responsible.
A rate loaded wrongly from a scanned page is not a small mistake. It is a price someone will hold you to. So "staff can check it before it goes live" is doing most of the work in that sentence.
The question the launch does not answer
A check only protects you when someone is there to do it. When we counted more than 271,000 work emails from the desks I ran, 26.7% of the human mail was sent after 18:00 or before 08:00, on the sender's own clock. Travel does not keep office hours, and neither does the supplier who changes a rate.
So when you test any tool like this, test it at the worst moment and not in the demo. Who reviews the draft when the request comes in late? What does the tool do when nobody has approved its answer: wait, or send? And when it hands over, does your colleague get the whole conversation, or only the last line?
The test Speight proposes is a fair one. It is just harder to pass at night.
What happens in your agency to a request that arrives after the last person has gone home?
Source: Travel Weekly — Travelgenix targets reduced travel agency workload with Luna products.