Boosting IAGL rewards redemptions with intelligent AI recommendations

Currently, the process of finding an available reward flight can be a stressful experience for customers. They struggle to effectively understand and use their rewards, such as Avios and companion vouchers, and must navigate multiple channels to find and redeem their rewards. Additionally, customers must know their desired destination in order to search for a reward flight, which can be a time-consuming and frustrating process involving a lot of trial and error. Furthermore, IAG Loyalty is limited in their ability to recommend flights or destinations to customers, particularly if the customer already has something in mind but there is no availability.

Recognising the complexity and value of this use case, we decided to collectively create a proof of concept (PoC) - named Genie - to test whether Gen AI could help IAG Loyalty solve the challenge of finding available reward flights in a more efficient manner. The key question was whether Gen AI could help match customers to their perfect reward flight more easily and efficiently.

Importantly, users feel this is a genuinely useful application of Gen AI -- without feeling like a chatbot. Critically, we have demonstrated that we can provide IAGL customers a unified view of available rewards and redemption options - delivering a simpler, more intuitive, and engaging user experience.

In support of this, we’ve shared critical insights into how IAGL can bring Genie to life in production, and what tech, data, and resources would be needed to do so. IAGL are excited about the early results and are interested in investing further into Gen AI by taking an incremental approach and continuing to build out the PoC to really validate whether this is something they want to eventually productionise. The future possibilities for Genie are endless.