Flight Centre Global Leisure deploys AI agent to help build holidays

Wendie Lee.

Flight Centre Global Leisure has built and deployed AI agents that help travel advisors assemble complex holiday itineraries and helps customers get “instant responses” to questions.

In a broadcast interview on the sidelines of this year’s Salesforce Dreamforce conference, chief product officer for technology, sales and service Wendie Lee outlined the role for AI agents in assisting customers and advisors.

“For the advisor, by having an agent that helps them piece together complex holidays from various sources, they can then add their knowledge to that and create this amazing experience, but they don't have to do all the hard work of finding all of that information from what is a really vast ecosystem of travel suppliers,” Lee said.

She said that designing and assembling holidays is “more complex than you realise, across air and land and tours.”

Lee said that beyond helping advisors with the immediate task of assembling holidays, the AI agent is making a real operational difference, reflected in both productivity gains and revenue growth.

“\It's definitely enabled us to grow sales and create a higher value of travel experiences for our customers,” Lee said.

“Our average booking value increases because we can sell more holidays with potentially the same number of advisers. and for us as a business, it can lower the cost of service, but also meets the needs of the customer.

“So, it both meets the needs of the customer but also can help our business perform at a revenue and profit level.”

A second AI agent use case is in assisting travellers that book holidays through Flight Centre Global Leisure.

“[It’s about] making it easy for the customer to contact us any way they want, when they want, and always being there is where AI can make a really big difference,” Lee said.

“We have enabled a number of channels to give them instant responses. 

“In the past they would have been having to call,” she said, adding that voice remains a contact option.

“We still do have some of that in our business where if they want to call, they can call,” she said.

At a group level, Flight Centre indicated it would seek to deploy AI agents “across every one of our leisure brands and functions.”

It also made executive appointments to oversee this adoption of agentic AI, as well as of other forms of AI more broadly.