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."