Travel Automation Leaders on Customer Service Crisis Performance

Almost exactly 6 years to the date when travel’s customer service went through a catastrophic collapse because of Covid. We’re seeing a version of that now, concentrated in the Middle East but rippling across regions. The industry promised it would be better next time. Millions went into AI chatbots, self-service rebooking, automated call routing. The past two weeks have been the first real stress test of those promises. I genuinely want to know: did it work? Because the complaints I’m seeing on social media look painfully familiar. Same “due to heavy volumes” banners on the same travel homepages. I’d like to hear from people building and operating these systems about what’s actually different now versus 2020. Here’s the tension I want to explore: if the investment in automation came at the cost of human surge capacity, did six years of technology investment actually build crisis-grade customer service, or just make normal customer service cheaper?