Acai Travel's Pavel Pratyush
Travel operations AI technology Acai Travel was named by the judging panel as the winner of the Business Travel Innovation Faceoff at Business Travel Show Europe in London on Wednesday.
Acai provides travel management companies and other travel sellers with "an AI brain that thinks like the most experienced travel agent that your TMC has," Acai co-founder and chief technology officer Pavel Pratyush said in his Faceoff presentation. "It's a brain that understands policies, that can figure out what the traveler wants and that never goes to sleep, is available 24/7 and doesn't get burned out."
Among the capabilities that Pratyush highlighted included making decisions based on travel policies—such as knowing that a company's VIP traveler does not need trip approval but that other travelers do—and being able to adapt as new policies rules and exceptions are added. It also can enhance service during flight disruptions, being able to understand waivers and traveler preferences to support travelers in rebooking flights, and can handle complex scenarios, such as a changed group event that requires a long list of attendee reservations that need alterations.
"In a matter of minutes, it can go through each reservation separately, making sure they are policy-compliant and even communicating with the traveler," Pratyush said.
Launched in 2023 with co-founder Riccardo Vittoria—who also founded 30SecondsToFly, which was acquired by American Express Global Business Travel in 2020—has since established such TMC partners as Altour, World Travel Inc., Australian agencies Platinum Travel Group and Connections Travel Group, and Perk. Among its investors is Amadeus, which last year announced it was taking a minority stake in Acai.
While Acai works with sellers besides TMCs, such as online travel agencies and airlines, it does not have plans to work directly with corporate travel buyers and "would always want to complement the TMCs," Pratyush said. He said that while AI would be able to automate 80 to 85 percent of the work of agents, it would never reach 100 percent.
That distinction stood out to the judging panel, as judge Carine Morin, regional travel manager for the EMEA region for ServiceNow, noted that it was "lovely to see one of the innovations go towards helping TMCs."
Fellow judge Benjamin Park, executive director of travel and sustainability for Parexel International, said the capabilities of handling travel disruptions "gets to an everyday problem. The scale of what this can solve as a product impacts every single trip."
Morin also said the panel would "love the tool to evolve a little bit" and be able to trigger disruption management when an event happened rather than the trigger being the request by a traveler to the agency.
AI-powered meeting planning technology startup Nowadays was named the People's Choice winner of the Faceoff, receiving the most votes from travel buyers who watched the presentations during the pre-conference event for hosted buyers. For Nowadays and its co-founder and CEO Anna Sun, it was the third win in a row, having also earned People's Choice honors at the Faceoffs at Business Travel Show America and Business Travel Show Asia. Nowadays also was the judges' choice winner at both of those events, and the judging panel at BTS Europe—which also included Keesup Choe, CEO of last year's winner, PredictX, and Andy Hoskins, editor-in-chief of BTN stablemate The Beat—gave the company an honorable mention.
Other participants in this year's Innovation Faceoff included Thrust Carbon, Direct Travel, Travel Code, Versa, Kayak for Business, SeatCash and Groupize.ai.