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Management

Omega World Travel Is Ready to Debut AI Duty of Care Tools

By JoAnn DeLuna / January 04, 2018 / Contact Reporter
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A month after Amazon launched Alexa for Business, Omega World Travel is ready to debut a pair of tools to help travel managers pull up traveler location information: its chatbot for smartphones and an Alexa-based voice chat. They will go live once Amazon approves the Alexa functionality, and the travel management company expects that to occur this month.

"Even before they announced Alexa for Business, I knew it was going to be leveraged for the business environment," said Omega VP of IT and data analytics Nadim Hajje.

Alexa has nearly 170 travel and transportation functions, which Amazon calls "skills," but they're mostly currency guides and converters, flight and hotel finders, navigation tools and trip planners and public transportation, taxi and ridesharing tools. Concur was among the first to develop a business travel skill; it allows Concur subscribers to inquire about upcoming business trips. Hajje noticed "there was nothing really around duty of care. … You can never really check where your travelers are, where they're going to be or who's in what city. That's why we built our own skill."

The chatbot allows a travel manager to use Web-based chat on his or her smartphone to request a view of travelers' locations. The travel manager also can ask for information on travelers by destination or flight number. The travel manager can request the same information by speaking to Alexa and can log on to Alexa on their computers to see Alexa cards that display more detailed information like airline, origin, destination, departure time and arrival time.

A sample Alexa conversation:

Travel manager: Alexa, ask Omega to tell me where my travelers are.

Alexa: You have 17 travelers across 17 locations.

Travel manager: Alexa, who is in London?

Alexa: There are two travelers in London. [States traveler names]

Travel manager: Get locators in London.

Alexa: There are two unique record locators at the airport. Please view the details in the Alexa card.

Travel Manager: Alexa, what are the record locator details for [Passenger Name Record] YVROZA?

Alexa: Record locator details can be found in the Alexa card.

The chatbot and Alexa access traveler tracking data from the existing OmegaCare duty of care platform, which pulls booking data from Concur, Cytric and GetThere, as well as off-channel bookings for which travelers forward itineraries.

Ironing Out the Kinks

Omega's Alexa skill is not perfect. As with other voice-activated products, the system doesn't always hear the user correctly, so it may not retrieve the desired information. But Omega is working on it. The TMC has been piloting the chatbot and Alexa skill internally but will continue to fine-tune them once Omega begins beta testing with more clients, Hajje said.

Omega also is looking at other ways to retrieve the content. Travel managers could receive a menu of options, for example, rather than spelling out record locators, which are prime opportunities for Alexa to misinterpret.

And duty of care is only the beginning, Hajje said. Omega plans to build more functionality into the Alexa skill, such as year-over-year spend comparisons, which travel managers can access through Omega's data analytics product, Omegalytics. "Whatever we do with Alexa, the same thing will get surfaced in the chatbot, as well," Hajje said. "Now we have the knowledge in terms of what it will take to do all these things. … The possibilities are endless."

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