Operational changes can be planned and carefully managed. The next crisis can't.
This is a core challenge faced by leaders in the travel & hospitality, hotel, and airline industries — three sectors that face many of the same obstacles:
- Operational changes such as new app rollouts, policy updates, and service modifications that require customer buy-in.
- Crisis management due to system outages, safety incidents, and weather disruptions that demand immediate response.
Whether it’s a planned change or an unforeseen crisis, an instant understanding of customer voice is essential to
- prevent reputation damage,
- maintain operational efficiency,
- and enable informed decision-making under pressure.
Getting out ahead of these situations is essential, especially in industries where frustration rapidly builds in the face of inconveniences and poor customer service. Customers will voice publicly on social media and switch to a competitor in the blink of an eye.
Unfortunately, traditional analytics simply can't keep pace with the speed of modern travel operations — an “intelligence gap” stands in the way.
The "Intelligence Gap" that's costing leaders
When a booking system crashes or a new mobile app launches, waiting weeks for customer feedback analysis means decisions are made in the dark during the most critical moments.
Consider the real stakes: a major airline often requires a team of analysts to manually review hundreds of calls just to support a single operational change. This process delays decision-making for weeks and limits insight to only a handful of listening exercises per year.
Meanwhile, customer reaction spreads across social media within minutes or hours, not days. A confused passenger's post about a new app interface can generate thousands of retweets before traditional feedback mechanisms even register that the issue exists.
And the cost isn't just operational; it's competitive. Customers will jump ship in a heartbeat ... and your competitors are ready and waiting.
AI-powered conversation intelligence solutions are the answer.
Travel & Hospitality: Keep a pulse on customer voice during operational changes
Policy changes are designed to make things clearer: streamlined procedures, better customer outcomes, and reduced confusion. However, when travel companies introduce any new changes to their policies (or even UX/UI modifications), they often have the opposite effect, particularly in the minutes/hours/days immediately following the change.
Consider the following scenario: A travel company makes an app change, moving the “cancellation” option under a new “manage my booking” button with the intent of decluttering its UI. Customers — seeing this change for the first time — are confused about how to cancel.
Leaders want–and need–to know: How many people are calling in voicing confusion with this issue? Are they one-time/first-time customers or the loyal/frequent flyer type? How are agents explaining the UI change, and are those customers understanding how to find the cancel option once the agent has explained?
Conversation intelligence reveals that not just one, but hundreds of customers are asking agents for help canceling their bookings, citing problems finding the options in the new app UI.
Leaders want to dig deeper, asking:
- What's confusing customers?
- What are they apprehensive about?
- What are they positive about?
- How can we be helpful and proactive?
The data reveals an interesting finding: The “How do I cancel?” confusion is 94% coming from the “loyal/frequent flyer” customers. The “one-time/first-time customers” group is not even aware of the app change.
With this insight, leaders now understand — in minutes — what the real customer issues are.
These insights empower them to send real-time answers, helping agents provide approved information around the app change — all in clicks, not code.
When the system detects questions about “cancellation”, it provides agents with specific guidance about where to find the updated features in the interface.
This enables travel & hospitality companies to distinguish between policy resistance and implementation confusion, allowing them to address the root cause of customer concerns during any operational (or UI) change, not weeks or months after the fact.
Hotels: Managing guest frustration during system outages
Technology is amazing — convenient, time saver, and more ... when it works as intended.
Imagine an all-too-realistic scenario where a major hotel's check-in and key card systems crash, just a few days before the biggest nationwide travel weekend of the year. Word spreads through social media, and customers start calling in.
This hotel is on the brink of a PR disaster, one with both immediate and long-term consequences.
While the tech side of the operation is hard at work resolving the issue, the phones (and chats and emails and social media messages) are exploding.
Leaders want–and need– to know: "What are guests most frustrated about during the system outage?" They know they are angry and annoyed (see flurry of inbound messages), but what specifically is bothering them most? What are they worried about?
Real-time conversation intelligence reveals that guests' concerns fall into 3 main buckets:
- Being locked out of rooms they've already paid for
- Losing reservations that haven’t been backed up in the system
- Security concerns about manual key processes
These insights distinguish between guests who express understanding of technical issues versus those who demand immediate solutions. Furthermore, the system identifies whether guest segments (such as business travelers, families, and so on) have different priority concerns.
With this granular-level data, hotel management can prioritize communication and solutions based on actual guest concerns:
- If intelligence shows the primary concern is room access rather than new bookings, staff can focus on manual key solutions first.
- If guests are worried about lost reservations, management can proactively communicate about data backup procedures.
Even better: Customer service agents receive real-time talking points to help them address the most pressing issues. Operational decisions about resource allocation can be made based on evidence rather than assumptions.
Once again, we've moved from reactive damage control to informed guest service — ones that address actual priorities during system failures.
Airlines: Managing customer anxiety and logistics during a system-wide IT outage
System-wide IT outages are an unfortunate reality in today’s digital airliner operations. According to this report from Thales Group, the aviation industry experienced a 600% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks.
However, when a booking system outage does happen — especially during peak travel season — it triggers immediate operational chaos, and thousands of passenger calls as travelers worry about their reservations, refund eligibility, and rebooking options.
In this scenario, leaders want to know: "What are guests most frustrated about when they call us during a booking system outage?" and “Which booking alternatives are they asking about?" and “What are the most pressing issues to address?"
Conversation intelligence dashboards display a spike in volume around the incident in real time, with mentions of "booking system down" and “can’t access reservations” increasing dramatically over 12 hours.
But raw volume doesn't tell the whole story. The devil, as they say, is in the details.
Real-time conversation intelligence reveals that customers' primary concern is whether their existing reservations are still valid and secure.
Conversation intelligence distinguishes between passengers expressing general frustration about website/app access (which could be a reasonable assumption) versus those with specific concerns about lost bookings, payment security, and rebooking procedures (based on real-time conversations).
Conversational intelligence can auto-detect questions related to booking system outages and proactively display approved talking points to agents in real time, ensuring consistent, approved communication with customers.
The system provides agents with specific guidance, such as: "Your reservation is secure and confirmed. Our systems are being restored with enhanced security measures. We are able to process changes and rebookings over the phone at no additional cost."
Crisis communication is no longer reactive scrambling.
Instead, it's informed, consistent messaging that addresses passengers' actual booking concerns during critical moments when accurate information and passenger confidence are essential.
From crisis to clarity: How AI-Powered conversation intelligence impacts travel operations
With Cresta AI Analyst, leaders can ask natural-language questions about their customer conversations and get instant answers backed by real conversation data.
Whether a travel company needs to understand customer confusion about policy changes, a hotel must prioritize guest concerns during system outages, or an airline requires immediate insights during IT issues, AI Analyst delivers results in minutes rather than weeks.
United Airlines has experienced this transformation firsthand. As Brandy Maxwell, Head of Insights-to-Action at United Airlines, explains:
"Cresta's AI Analyst has been a game changer! It has significantly enhanced our ability to quickly understand customer inquiries, enabling us to make informed policy decisions very quickly. It's also helping us provide our agents [with] the information they need to effectively address customer questions. In an industry that is very unpredictable, Cresta adds immense value in our ability to react quickly."
Consider the operational impact: instead of manually reviewing hundreds of calls to understand policy implementation issues ...
- Travel & hospitality companies can instantly identify whether customers are confused about procedures or resistant to changes.
- Hotels can distinguish between guests frustrated by room access versus those worried about lost reservations during system failures.
- Airlines can separate general safety anxiety from specific concerns about affected airports during incidents.
Natural language Q&A provides leaders with insight into their customer experience, enabling them to make informed decisions during their most critical operational moments.
This is part of our series exploring how AI Analyst delivers transformative insights across various industries. Read our complete overview of AI Analyst here, then chat with our team about a custom demo.
