Serko on Wednesday will launch the beta version of its Serko.ai personal travel assistant, a traveler-focused stage that Serko SVP of product David Holyoke said will help form the product for wider use in the corporate travel sphere.
The Serko.ai tool is a ground-up-built product that is "driven by a multi-agent system" to manage trips. Travelers start with an optional onboarding process in which they provide information to help the tool understand their preferences—preferred carriers or hotels, preferred time of day to travel or amenities they consider vital, for example. They also can provide their travel policy document, which the tool can read and apply to bookings.
Travelers then can converse with a conversational, supervisory agent that in turn works with "dozens of agents behind the scenes" to search for travel options and build itineraries that fit their needs for the specific trip, preferences and policies. For example, if a traveler provides an address where they are traveling, the tool will know the traveler's home airport and the airport nearest to the address, so there's no need to enter "to" and "from" airport codes as with a standard online booking tool, Holyoke said.
When presenting results, the tool shows how many options it looks at and presents about five that best fit the traveler's needs, with an indicator in the tool showing which ones are the strongest fits, he said. Travelers still can see other available options if they wish.
"Even though we're getting people to the options, we understand we're building trust here," Holyoke said. "The future state is to get to a point where you say, 'I have to go a meeting next week,' and we just give you the perfect trip, but on the journey to that, we need to give full transparency and visibility."
Once decided on their options, travelers can buy all or just a portion of their itinerary through the tool and can make ancillary purchases or choose seats within the tool as well, he said.
As part of the beta offering, Serko has partnered with Hopper to offer its Cancel For Any Reason service, which Serko is offering under that name "stress-free cancellation," meaning bookings are refundable up to three hours before a flight, even on nonrefundable tickets, or up to the time of hotel check-in, even on prepaid rates. In the long term, Serko plans to make that offering "a staple offering," where travelers can either choose that per booking or subscribe to it as a bundled offering.
"We want to give people confidence to use this, so if they have any regrets, they can walk away," Holyoke said. "We [also] believe that travel is too complicated as it is, and there's a lot of savings to be had for individuals and organizations to give them options to take lower-priced inventory that hasn’t been available because the restrictions were too tight."
Once a trip has begun, Serko has partnered with World Travel to provide on-trip support to travelers when needed, he said. Serko is working on building on-trip experiences capabilities into the tool, which will come in later updates prior to its wider release in the coming months.
The beta project is about building the user experience for the traveler, Holyoke said, and it will inform the later version that could be adopted by larger customers.
"That's the part of the release that will be happening in September, that will make this a full, managed travel offering: the ability for a company to roll this out," he said, "to let their people onboard, set policy, enforce policy, have duty of care and get preferred supplier rates—all the staples you would expect in Serko's Zeno and GetThere products today."
While Serko expects it will work directly with some customers to deploy Serko.ai, it also will work with TMCs as well, Holyoke said. He said it particularly could be an opportunity for TMCs that don't have the capability to build AI platforms themselves.
"The fact that we are working with a TMC and having a number of other TMC conversations already shows you we have a commitment to working with the industry in that regard," he said. "It will be on them to see how it fits: Does it run independently or complementary?"