Air India introduces AI-driven booking for quick flight reservations

MUMBAI: Air India has rolled out an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven feature, eZ Booking, whereby customers can complete their reservation on its website in fewer steps by just texting or talking to the AI Agent with their detailed travel itinerary, the airline said in a press statement issued recently.
Currently available exclusively for members of the Maharaja Club, Air India’s loyalty programme, the innovation helps customers book their ticket on the Air India website, airindia.com, 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 requirements 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.
How eZ Booking works
Customers can express their travel needs in simple natural language. For example, they can say, ‘Give me the first flight from Delhi to Mumbai tomorrow’ or ‘I need to go to Chennai from Mumbai next Thursday and return on Friday,’ 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.
Voice Input: Guests can also talk to eZ Booking instead of entering text. This further simplifies the effort needed to convey the travel intention and creates an almost human-like interaction.
Changes or Choices with Minimum Commands: In case guests 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. This combination of visual presentation and text or voice-driven changes speeds up the entire reservation process, sparing the customer the hassle of navigating back and forth several screens to change and re-enter the choices made earlier.
“In our pursuit of developing technologies to elevate customer experience and provide them with a seamless and intelligent digital interface, we have introduced eZ Booking on our website, initially for our loyalty programme members. 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, which further enriches our strong digital channel presence,” said Dr. Satya Ramaswamy, Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Air India.
"eZ Booking further enhances the 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, 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," the airline said.
Guests can find the eZ Booking feature on the top navigation bar once they log into the Maharaja Club website on www.airindia.com. Air India plans to launch the eZ Booking feature on its mobile website and mobile app in the coming weeks.