Serko's David Holyoke on...
Adding functionality and complexity following Serko.ai's beta
Getting past the "first date" mentality with AI booking and management
Plans for TMC partners and enterprise customers
Serko earlier this month launched its Serko.ai personal travel assistant in the U.S. following several months of beta testing with travelers. Company executives have said the natural-language platform ultimately will eclipse its legacy online booking tools Zeno and GetThere, which Serko acquired from Sabre in a $12 million deal. For now, Serko chief product officer David Holyoke said the booking platform was focusing on the small and midsize business market as it builds toward more enterprise complexity. He spoke recently with BTN executive editor Michael B. Baker about the expansion from traveler to organization clients, Serko's development roadmap and what its future might look like with pricing, enterprise clients and travel management company partnerships. An edited transcript follows:
BTN: How has Serko.ai evolved since the beta launch?
David Holyoke: May was a closed beta. It was very traveler experience focused. We were really changing the way travel was planned, searched for and booked from the way it's been done for probably 30 years online. It was combination of speaking with an agent on the left, and showing more traditional results on the right, where those things worked in unison. We had hundreds of closed beta participants that were engaging in the product on a daily basis, running real searches and doing real transactions with us. What we learned was the UI, the UX, definitely resonated. People liked the balance that we were striking. Just normal booking tool flows are fine. They're optimized, but obviously people are working with AI and authentic tools every day in their personal and professional life. A lot of people that are going in this way have just gone fully chat, and what users told us was that they felt we struck the right balance. So that was really good in that regard. We certainly learned where we needed to harden and make improvements. It was great that users were pushing our agents for more and more: more complex trips, the ability to book for other people, to do more group coordination, so it gave us a lot of signal around what we need to keep running with. And while all that was going on, we were building the other side of the product, which was the company experience to give organizations, travel departments and travel managers the ability to get a program set up in minutes, to set guardrails, like load a policy, translate that and really have real control and visibility about where how employees are using the product. So, all of that was happening in a very condensed period to [make] the general access release in early October. Now we are no longer closed. Anyone can sign up and register both at the organization level or at a traveler level. That will just drive more insights, more learnings and more rapid iteration.
BTN: Was the beta exclusively focused on the traveler?
Holyoke: We were in parallel. We had a lot of client innovation forums. Serko works with a lot of global and US-based companies of all sizes, and our teams and I participated in a lot of different customer forums to bring them [into] what we were doing on the traveler side as well as showing them how we were thinking about the company experience, really getting their feedback. So, while we weren't necessarily running a closed beta on [the admin] side, we were getting real research and real feedback from the industry. Along the way, buyers consistently told us they were impressed with the speed that we were moving and that we were really listening to their feedback and incorporating that. So, obviously now [program administrators] can play with it in real time and even further test it and give us a lot more feedback as we go forward.
BTN: As users have been pushing for more complexity, has it evolved to meet that?
Holyoke: We are still doing flights and accommodations. We are taking from a single prompt: Where are you going? We're not really basing this on airport code to airport code, but what's the destination? What are the dates? What's the purpose of the trip? Then we learn what people's preferences are and obviously where their guardrails are. We're bringing back a single view on both flights and accommodations and single search results, letting them build, a filter and control all within that same experience. They don't have to restart or rerun anything. They can explore things on the map. They can say, “sort by cheapest.” They can say, “show me only hotels with gyms or restaurants under this price point,” and the same thing with flights. It's really quick and fascinating. We've got a pretty aggressive roadmap this quarter where we will bring more capabilities in terms of types of trips they can book, etc.
BTN: What does that roadmap look like?
Holyoke: We build, test and release on a weekly basis. We are really a fast development team, and we built this product and this tech stack in a way that we can bring things really rapidly to market. It's always going to be data informed, from people using the product, from research and things like that. But at a high level, [the roadmap is to let you] pretty much book anything for yourself, getting that in a really good spot across not just flights and accommodations but rail and ground as well. The way we are thinking about that is not as separate things, as the industry has historically done. The agent will be intelligent and smart enough to say, "Should I fly there? Should I drive there? Should I take the train there? And when I get there, that last mile, should I be renting a car, should I be ridesharing, or should I be taking kind of public transport?" So that's a big step in that regard. [There will be] lots of other things, like allowing you to book for other people and group coordination and working with frontier models, and how we're improving the personalization and the memory context over multiple sessions and just engage in getting to know the user more and more. So, it's moving more and more from an order taker to a trusted companion, a trusted assistant.
BTN: What about on the admin side?
On that side, it's just going a lot deeper. We have built an organizational structure: roles, permissions, reactive level reporting. We're not building dashboards. Everything is GenUI reporting, and you can pull and ask your agent questions, and it can run reports and all of that. We're going to turn that a lot more into insights. So, it's not just, "How's my spend trending," but the agent surfacing, "Hey, these are things I'm seeing that you might want to optimize or look for or keep an eye on." Building structure and further roles and letting you have multiple policies just allows us to go up the ladder in terms of serving complex organizations. So those are all things that are planned [in] the next two quarters. You'll see big leaps further and further each quarter. We've got a good north star where we want to go over a multi-year period, but obviously, those things will evolve and change as technology continues advance. But we have a really good understanding of what we're trying to do, and we've got a great team that's really focused and building, which is exciting.
BTN: Where does the human agent fit in?
Holyoke: Serko.ai today is still backed by 24/7 human travel agent support. We are not dependent on traditional [global distribution system] or a TMC to actually fulfill. We announced at GBTA World Travel [Inc.] is a partner of ours, and we are readying the platform for them to use with their customers and such as well. [Editor's note: World Travel, Inc. announced in late July it was partnering with Serko.ai for booking and travel content integration in its new travel and expense platform, Spree.] So, optionality is there. You can use this with a travel management company or obviously how we've been building this, especially on this with smaller organizations, it can run independent of that. Trust is really what we're solving for. And while we have built a very intelligent and smart agent, or multi-agents—we say agent, but there's a lot of agents behind the agent that's making all this work—we do recognize that there are times and edge cases where human intervention is needed to build that comfort level or that just to elevate that service experience. So, we have AI agents working with human agents hand in hand. When the handoff has to happen, we're able to pass all that full context information over to a travel agent. They're able to look at that. and step in and take immediate action as needed. We're doing that with our partner World Travel right now, but we certainly can do that with any travel management company that would be interested in working with us.
BTN: Is adding more TMCs a priority, and are you focusing largely on SME or also working with enterprise clients:
Holyoke: Initially Serko.ai is really being built for the SMB/SME space. On the TMC side, we are very focused on delivering for World Travel first, but our sales and business development team is talking to many other travel management companies. Once we finish the work, to implement WTI, anyone could then have access if they would want to. It's a relatively easy process for us to deploy to other TMCs if they see the value of the benefit. We are very focused right now on what we think is underserved in SMB where we can go really direct in that area. But with GetThere and our customers there, we have a lot of large global multinationals. We are engaged with them and bringing them on the journey of how we're building this and how we think we could work with them today versus when we would be ready to service a more complete offering on that front.
BTN: How do you build trust as clients look at a new AI model for booking?
Holyoke: Agentic and AI agents or technology, especially in travel, a lot of people are experimenting and playing with it from a research and planning standpoint. I think that's pretty universal that adoption is there, right? People are talking to their ChatGPT or personal agents and just asking and playing and really building trips. That's happening a lot on the leisure consumer side especially. But transacting? First of all, a lot of these agents can't do that. They get you to a certain point and then they hand off, and it's a very disjointed experience. People are a little bit like, "What's happening here? Who's really owning the relationship? Who's going to service me if something happens? Then, a lot of beta users were asking the agent to do everything for the user, and we don't believe users or organizations are ready to give the keys over to everything. So, we've really been all about a kind of a courtship. This is a first interaction. You don't ask someone to marry you usually on the first date. You have to kind of build that level of trust in that relationship. We're recommending. We're giving insights on why we recommend. We're helping get to decisions and choices really easy. Everything we've built can actually do everything for someone autonomously if they wanted to do that, but we don't believe people are ready for that today. That's a tomorrow.
BTN: There’s also a fintech layer that is creating a little more flexibility with the product. How does that work?
The reason that we've done that is that we believe it helps get over the mindset of an AI agent [making mistakes]. If I did something and I [realize] I'm not allowed or this is not right, I can cancel and make the transaction go away, and you get that peace of mind protection. It also simplifies a lot of things in terms of changes, modifications, cancellations, approval processes, all of that. With the fintech built in, everything is reversible at any moment in time up to up to the departure. It allows a lot greater flexibility, and we think these are things that are helping lay a foundation of trust that we can build off of.
BTN: As part of the beta, you were offering "stress-free cancellation" protection that gave protection for even nonrefundable air tickets and prepaid hotel rates. Does that remain a free offering?
Holyoke: Now that we're in a general release, we are charging a nominal transaction fee for a personal agent, the protection, the proactive monitoring 24/7, as any travel management company or service provider would be doing. We put that at a checkout. We fully display what that is. But the offering is still part of our core, and we're intending that for the foreseeable future. In the future, we'll test various different pricing scenarios. You could see things from maybe freemium offerings to more professional offerings to company subscription models, things like that. But that's obviously doing a lot of conversations with the industry and with customers to explore on that. Right now, it's one offering with all that bundled in for a very small fee
BTN: What will the long-term transition look like for your customers on the legacy GetThere and Zeno online booking tools?
Holyoke: Serko is in a great position that it has a lot of products today serving in different parts of the world and different customers of different needs and complexities. We're continuing to service and maintain those products and those customers and those relationships. We are building Serko.ai in a way that will allow customers to easily migrate to that offering if they choose to in the future. Ultimately, we're creating roads and pathways for everyone to migrate. That's the goal. That's the hope. But obviously we need to do that responsibly and bring our customers along that on that journey.