Easing Customer Anxieties

Transcript

Rich Maslen:Let's be honest, there's few things that raise the blood pressure quite like air travel. Whether it's the mysterious disappearances we see of gate agents when there's a delay, a missed connection, lost baggage, a cryptic delay notification, or just literally standing in a queue that defies logic and physics. For many travelers, what's meant to be the start of an exciting adventure, a long-awaited reunion with a loved one, becomes a source of real stress. But lately, that stress has become a little less funny and a bit more chronic. Travelers are no longer anxious about legroom, they're anxious about whether they'll actually get home at all. And yet, while we grumble about airports and airline meals, the expectations we place on travel experience has never actually been higher. Today, travelers want seamless journeys. Instant updates and proactive solutions. And while airlines grapple with weather, IT outages, and a revolving door of regulations, travelers just want one thing: a sense that somewhere, someone is listening and has their back. On the other hand, airlines and travel tech companies are battling a very different reality, one that's shaped by weather volatility, system failures, shifting regulations, and global uncertainty. Delays and cancellations have become more frequent, more complex, and harder to predict. So how do we ease customer anxieties in this climate? Can innovation and AI help bridge the gap? Can technology, sometimes blamed as the depersonalization of service, actually become the invisible safety net that quietly protects the customer when things go wrong? To explore this, I'm delighted to welcome someone who knows all about designing customer-centric travel experiences under pressure. a man who's built a platform that tries to make air travel a little less painful. Please join me in welcoming Oliver Dlouhý, CEO of Kiwi.com. Thank you.

Oliver Dlouhý:Thank you, Richard. Thank you, everybody. It's great to be here.

Rich Maslen:Thank you, Oliver. Thanks for joining us. So, Oliver, you've built a business on solving travel pain points. So let's start with the obvious. What, in your views, are the top anxieties facing air travelers today?

Oliver Dlouhý:Yeah, so we serve like millions and millions of customers every year, and of course we are talking to them, listening to them. And there are like 4 main patterns, 4 main anxieties, if you will, that we are hearing all the time. The first one is pretty obvious: am I getting the best deal? We all know that this industry is price-driven and there's no need to talk about it more. But the 3 other ones are more interesting. Anxiety number 2: will I have all the necessary information in one place, ideally in my pocket, you know, at the time I need it? Will I have my boarding pass? Will I know the gate number? Will I know my check-in desk number? The flight status, potential delays, and so on. A very important thing the customers are anxious about. Anxiety number 3, what happens if shit hits the fan? Sorry, if there's a disruption, cancellation, delay, who's going to help me? And finally, anxiety number 4, what if I need to change my plans? What if I cannot travel on the date or to the destination? You know, what should I do and who's going to help me in that situation?

Rich Maslen:Do you think a lot of it's down to mindset of passengers? Do you think now passengers and travelers have got less patience and want things more immediately?

Oliver Dlouhý:I don't think that's the case. I think the passengers want exactly the same thing, and they wanted the same thing, you know, 5 years ago as they want now. They want a smooth, uneventful travel. From their perspective, air travel is a relatively simple thing. They board some metal tube and it gets them from A to B. We all know it's not that simple, but this is how Our customers at least perceive it. So, this hasn't changed. What has changed though is the number of disruptions. So, what we see in our data between 2019 and 2024, the ratio of disrupted flights and itineraries actually doubled. So, it's obviously becoming more visible and more prominent to the customers who are, rightfully so, seeking solutions.

Rich Maslen:But problems like that, you know, that has a massive impact on sort of the brand and the trust in the brand. Why is it so important to be able to find that right solution and build that loyalty up with customers?

Oliver Dlouhý:Yeah, so first of all, this is an industry-wide thing. Obviously, some brands, some airlines handle and prevent disruptions better than others, and those who are not doing it so well can suffer some brand damage. But this is an industry-wide thing, and we all know that there is only so much you can prevent, and there are simply things that you cannot you cannot be proactive with. For example, weather, for example, geopolitical situation that is changing all the time, and so on and so forth. So that's why I believe now more than ever it's important to not only try to prevent these things from happening, but to find solutions and mitigations and tools for the travelers to fix those things ideally in real time.

Rich Maslen:I guess, you know, what happens here is you become like a mediation panel now, don't you, in terms of the The relationship where you've got airlines, you've got airports, you know, you've got frustrated customers, airlines are overwhelmed. I guess, you know, do you feel like a marriage counselor in those circumstances, trying to keep everybody happy and bring them back together?

Oliver Dlouhý:Well, not necessarily marriage counselor, but maybe rather mistress at some point, because I'm sometimes giving to the travelers something that the airlines cannot or don't want to give to them. So, that's probably the position. But yeah, I guess let's move on.

Rich Maslen:So, you know, have we made— have we been too efficient really and made disruption too transactional now and forgotten the human side and forgot the passenger and, you know, the impact it's having on them?

Oliver Dlouhý:Yeah, so I think transactional is not necessarily a bad thing. I think 90% of the customer experience comes from the actual content, from what we offer to the customers, what are the alternatives, what are the solutions to their problems. The form is secondary. And I believe, you know, this is the pain of many airlines who can only offer, or most of the airlines actually offer solutions and alternative flights only within their own networks or within their alliances. So I believe that, well, it's really difficult to explain to the customer that they need to stay over for one night to get on their alternative flight while they see 3 or 4 other flights to their destination operated by another airline and they are rightfully so asking why, why cannot, why you can't rebook me on that flight, why I need to wait for another day.

Rich Maslen:It's a perfect example and I had the same thing actually coming out here and being disrupted and I had to fight to be able to be here or I wouldn't be on stage today with the options that were given to me. We've spoken previously on stage about making life more simplified for customers and airlines. You know, you were originally the bad boy of the industry. You know, you came in and disrupted and upset lots of people. You've now become more, you know, you've teamed up now with Ryanair, you've teamed up with other airlines, and you're building that trust and relationship with people.

Oliver Dlouhý:But from a business perspective, what does Yeah, so first of all, let me just address the bad boy thing. I cannot resist. I mean, we started as a tech company 15 years ago with like zero travel background, and we just wanted to build things for the customers and fix the problems arising from travel for the traveler, which we did. But along the way, we probably, you know, bended some rules and, you know, we probably did some things that we shouldn't have done. Yeah. Made a couple of airlines unhappy. And I think especially during COVID-19, we have realized that if we want to really bring the best possible customer experience, we need to work directly with our key suppliers, with the airlines, with you guys. So, this was the major shift and pivot when we, let's say, pivoted from a disruptor of the industry to an innovator who is trying to find an alignment between the travel interests and the airline interests. And I must say it's not always easy, but we believe that with our Kiwi.com Guarantee product that is built to address those anxieties that I spoke about, especially when it comes to disruption management, we found a way how to please both the customer and the airline.

Rich Maslen:You said there about fixing the problem, you know, do you think we're still stuck in this reactive mindset as an industry that we've been in for so long? That we only, you know, fix the experience after the drama unfolds, we're not planning ahead for it?

Oliver Dlouhý:Well, I think, so disruptions, most of the disruptions come unexpected, right? So I'm sure, and you know better than I do, that airlines are investing insane amount of money and resources into preventing those disruptions because any disruption is extremely costly for the airlines and for the whole industry. So I think most of the airlines actually are reaching the point of diminishing returns when it comes to prevention and being proactive. And as I said, I think disruptions are here to stay, especially with ever-changing geopolitical situation. You know, I don't need to comment on what's happening in the world, but I think investing in solutions that will provide alternatives to the customer and fix their broken itineraries in real time, the second it's obvious that the itineraries will be will be broken. I think that's the way to go and that's what we are investing in.

Rich Maslen:Right. So, Oliver, I'm going to give you 90 seconds now. This is your opportunity to plug Kiwi.com, Dom. Can you share an example of a product or feature or redesign Kiwi.com has implemented that directly addressed the customer anxiety? And I'm looking at the clock, right? You've got 90 seconds.

Oliver Dlouhý:Go. Okay. So, I think that will be the instant credit that we basically, that we load customer Kiwi.com credit balance in case the disruption happens. So basically, we scan the whole internet to learn about the disruption as soon as possible. And in most cases, we actually do it faster than anyone else. I receive a push notification about delay faster than I see it at the airport screen. Once we learn about that disruption, we find the best possible alternative to get the customer to their destination as close as possible to the original arrival time, and we credit the customer the money for them to book that alternative. And they can then decide if they choose that alternative or any other one. So there's no need for back and forth between us and the customer and our agents. And the most important thing is there is no cap on those, on the price of the alternative. If it's 5 or 10 times or 50 times more expensive, than the original flight, we still credit the customers the money. 91 seconds.

Rich Maslen:That was impressive. Was it a round of applause for Oliver getting that all in there? And he was under pressure there. He didn't know I was going to push that onto him. I think a key thing we brought up earlier on today is about AI. You know, let's talk about AI, which, you know, to many people is a villain and a hero in travel. How are you using it in an invisible way that's powerful that people are not seeing but So actually, AI is currently powering almost our whole customer support.

Oliver Dlouhý:Currently, more than 80% of all the requests or the inbound requests that we are getting are end-to-end, meaning without any touch of human agent, powered by AI. And honestly, that's the only way I believe to address crisis. Because the thing is, when nothing is happening, it's okay, it's super easy to serve the customers. Yeah. But when some disruption happens, for example, an IT outage, you know, or strike in Germany, you know, all recent examples, the number of customer inbound requests doesn't go 10% up, it triples or even more than that. And it's simply impossible to keep that many people, human agents, you know, on standby to tackle such a huge instant volume or immediate volume of requests. And we believe that AI is the first and only solution in history that can finally resolve, you know, all of these unexpected crises once for all to the customer's full satisfaction and also saving some costs along the way. So, and we are betting a lot on this, and we believe that within the next couple of months, more than 95% of our customer inbound requests will be fully end-to-end served by AI for great customer experience and scalability.

Rich Maslen:I think you still have the issue of trust in this process, and trust in automation is still really fragile. So how do you balance that machine-driven efficiency with human reassurance?

Oliver Dlouhý:That's actually funny. We are— we have one metric that we are watching since we released our first version of our AI engine. 2 years ago, and it's the percentage of customers who immediately ask for transfer to a human agent. And over those 2 years, actually, we saw this metric to go down by 80%. And this has nothing to do with the capability of our agent because the customer asks before the agent actually starts solving the problem. So what is this saying is that Given the widespread information in all the media about AI, you know, given customers' and travelers' personal user experience with AI, I think the trust is being built naturally. I think the customers start to understand that unlike the previous generations of chatbots and voicebots and whatnot, this time is different. And the AI agents, you know, if well integrated obviously, can tackle their problems, you know, the same way, if not better, as the human agents. And the trust is naturally improving every month.

Rich Maslen:I think, you know, I think it'd be interesting to see in a few years where we are with this because, you know, it does raise the questions, can AI really make disruptions feel less disruptive? Or is it just a clever way of saying nicely to people, sorry, you're going to be stuck in in Singapore for 2 nights because of flight disruption. And then you've got, and we've all been in this experience, that you end up in this chatbot spiral where AI keeps telling you the same thing over and over again without actually giving you the answer that you want. You know, that's my experience.

Oliver Dlouhý:It is, and I have the same experience with human agents. So, I think the AI will not fix the underlying processes. If the underlying process doesn't solve the problem, then neither AI nor human agent will be able to solve the problem. But honestly, not— well, we have the data for that. AI is consistently getting higher customer satisfaction score at Kiwi.com than human agents. And the reason is, A, the AI never gets tired, it never burns out, it never has a bad day after a breakup or whatever it is. The AI is consistently, consistently, I don't want to say good, but the AI behaves consistently in the way it was told to, unlike human agents. So again, it's about prompting, it's about making sure that there is a right prompt, that there is a right configuration, and in that case, I strongly believe that AI can, in 95% of cases, outperform human agents.

Rich Maslen:So Kiwi.com sits in a fascinating position between the traveler and the airline. Are you finding more willingness now from airlines to work with companies like yours, or do you still feel like that disruptor in the room, that old bad boy that was upsetting people?

Oliver Dlouhý:No, I think we totally do. We work with many airlines now. Just last week we announced a big partnership with American Airlines, Lufthansa Group before, AFKL. We were the first OTA that signed a deal with Ryanair, you know. originally a pretty hostile airline towards third parties. So I think things are changing, and as I said, I think it's primarily because we started focusing on solving the problems not just for the customers, but for the airlines as well. And I will give you one example, right? So yeah, I spoke about how we solve the problems for the customer, but what do we do for the airline? So first of all, with the airlines where we have a direct partnership, we are trying to channel all the requests through their preferred channel. We are the single point of contact for the customer. That means that customer always contacts us. And in more than 80% of the cases, we actually manage to resolve the problem without the need to contact the airline at all, right? So, and in those remaining 20%, we contact the airline through their preferred channel, be it API ideally, because then it's automated for both us and the airline saving the cost or their B2B channels and so on. But the bottom line is we are shielding the airline from the customer requests because we are dealing with the customers in most of the cases on our own.

Rich Maslen:Now, you've been an innovator in the business, but obviously not wanting to give away your trade secrets and what you're working on, is there anything exciting that you can give us an idea of, of what's in the pipeline? that you think can generally shift how customer experience disruption?

Oliver Dlouhý:There's something really exciting. I cannot share too much details, but it's connected to anxiety number 4, what if I need to change my plans or what if I need to cancel, and loyalty. But I cannot give away much more. But what I want to say is that the main product, the core product, Kiwi.com Guarantee works. It's live. serving millions of customers every month. And I invite every single airline that doesn't work with us yet to talk to us, or we will talk to you. And I think together we can make the world a better place for you and me and the entire human race.

Rich Maslen:Well, that helps massively. And, you know, if it solves disruption, I'm definitely in on that. You know, just one final thing, you know, you're You're changing how the industry looks at things, but at the same time, you're creating more competition for yourself by highlighting the value of these things that you're bringing on board. You know, how do you balance that from a business perspective to, you know, remain relevant and be the one that people need to go to?

Oliver Dlouhý:Yeah, so I think transparency is something this industry has been lacking a lot, you know, since its inception, right? And especially especially after the emergence of OTAs in the '90s, you know, many of them implemented gray hat or black hat methods. And we just wanted to be different. And I think the customers appreciate the transparency, appreciate that we communicate our fees, that we communicate cheaper options if they are available. And we believe that in the long run, this is the winning strategy because if we educate the customer, that at Kiwi.com you always find the best deal in a fully transparent way, we believe that we will win their loyalty over our competitors and over anyone else. And if we manage to solve their problems and address their anxieties along the way, we believe this is the winning strategy.

Rich Maslen:And just like a good efficient airline, we're perfectly on time, on time ending. So thank you everyone, round of applause for Oliver, please.

Oliver Dlouhý:Thank you. Thank you very much.

Copyright policy: All transcripts on this site are the copyright of CAPA - Centre for Aviation. Our reproduction policy is as follows: you may quote up to 400 words of any transcript on the condition that you attribute the transcript to CAPA - Centre for Aviation and link to the original video page. All other use is prohibited. While we aim for 100% accuracy in the transcript, there may be some minor transcribing errors.