Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing the travel sector in various aspects, as highlighted during the presentations at the 2025 ITB Berlin Convention.
Despite this advancement, 60 percent of Lufthansa’s clientele still opts for traditional booking methods via the website’s search functionality; however, this trend is evolving. Dr. Olaf Backofen from Lufthansa remarked, “The entire travel ecosystem is truly experiencing a transformation.” According to Backofen, the airline group is already leveraging AI effectively to create newsletters and other content. Furthermore, they are conducting an A/B test on the website of their subsidiary, Swiss, which emphasizes “Conversational Booking” to better understand customer preferences. The company is partnering with swifty, a provider specializing in AI-driven booking solutions.
The Lufthansa Group has realized significant advantages through the AI-assisted management of customer complaints. These complaints, which are often unstructured and presented in various languages, are organized and processed by an AI system developed in partnership with Microsoft. Consequently, the productivity of employees responsible for addressing these complaints has surged by 75 percent.
Artificial Intelligence has become an integral part of daily operations at TUI.
TUI has successfully integrated Artificial Intelligence into its business framework. The organization has created an AI assistant for its workforce, comprising 1,500 distinct agents that operate based on Large Language Models while ensuring data confidentiality. In the company’s 1,200 travel agencies, these AI assistants are utilized during phone interactions with service agents, facilitating quicker responses to inquiries.
In terms of direct customer engagement, as noted by André Exner from the TUI Group at the ITB Convention, AI is already in use. In the UK, all users of the company’s vacation assistance application now have the choice to search and book either through traditional methods or via a chatbot.
AI performance is expected to double every six months.
Michael Guimet, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft Copilot, highlighted the advantages of AI in enhancing business processes. Employees at Air India have incorporated Microsoft Copilot and its extensions into their Teams software, enabling them to swiftly analyze extensive data sets and derive insights. Guimet anticipates that further significant and rapid advancements will occur, as the performance of AI models is projected to double approximately every six months.
