Customer Support Reinvented

Technology is completely transforming the travel industry, from top to bottom, but what is less appreciated is the change in travel consumers facilitating the application of technology into new areas of the business.

- David Pavlik

The transformation of the travel industry began two decades ago with the rise of all the various websites and applications that allowed you to search for and book flights and hotels. What we are seeing today is a continuation of that transformation, adding new verticals and layers on top of that traditional search function. So now, for example, algorithms enable you to search for options for a getaway weekend below a certain price or to come up with an ideal itinerary that allows you to visit three European cities over a seven-day period within a certain price range.

At Kiwi.com we are pioneers in ‘virtual interlining’, whereby our proprietary algorithm enables customers to automatically combine flights from more than 700,650 airlines, many of them budget carriers that do not normally collaborate with each other, into a single itinerary. This massively increases the range of travel options we can offer consumers, from budget to luxury, as well as entirely new routes using multiple modes of transport that are not currently being served.

Future trends from disruptive technologies to watch out for include revolutions in the actual means of travel. Today, we are still travelling in remarkably traditional ways—via planes, trains and automobiles—but in future, those modes might include drones and hyper-loops. My own background includes a stint working at Elon Musk’s SpaceX in California, which aims to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to travel to and live on other planets.