AI can help anticipate and respond to such lapses even if the company was not at fault. In his book Setting the Table, famous New York restaurateur Danny Meyer talks about “writing a great last chapter” when dealing with a dissatisfied customer. He encourages employees to turn a mistake into a positive experience that the customer will remember. Machine learning can help travel companies write the last chapter by, for example, suggesting complementary services that the customer has accessed in prior trips or anticipating their unstated needs and wishes as inferred from past interactions.
Managing Demand with Greater Sophistication. In other industries, AI has been a boon to channel and yield management as companies have begun to rely on machine learning to forecast demand and optimize production across channels and markets.
Travel companies have been making similar decisions for decades but generally without the assistance of machine learning. They decide how…