Finding solutions for travel disruptions in an age of climate change

The numbers would give anyone pause. For travelers, though, they add up to delays that can mean anything from a minor inconvenience to the ruin of journey of a lifetime.

In the United States in 2022, delayed or canceled flights affected 200 million passengers.

Disrupted flights in the U.S. totaled $34 billion in costs.

And so far in 2023, nearly a quarter of U.S. flights have been delayed.

Those statistics aren’t likely to improve anytime soon.

“As climate change happens, these disruptions are going to be more frequent, they’re going to be more intense,” Jeff Katz, founder and CEO of Journera, told a Center Stage audience at The Phocuswright Conference in Fort Lauderdale.

During a session entitled, “Journey Interrupted (and Solutions for the Future),” panelists weighed in on both the growing problem and the hope offered by artificial intelligence and other technologies that can provide increased access to traveler data.

“This notion of knowing the traveler’s journey and dealing with it in anticipation or maybe in response is really going to be more important than ever,” added Katz, who moderated the session along with Charuta Fadnis, the senior vice president of research and product strategy at Phocuswright.

The panel included Brian Davis, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for Sun Country Airlines; Theresa Wise, CEO at Utaza and formerly the chief information officer for Delta Air Lines; and Paul Weaver, vice president for global digital product design at Hyatt.

Davis said he’s excited about the potential for technology to ease the pain of disruptions.

“If a flight is disrupted today [and] there are 186 people on that flight, there are 186 different preferred solutions to that problem,” he said.

He offered an example in Florida, where Sun Country Airlines serves 12 airports.

“If a flight from Orlando is disrupted, there are some people on that plane [for whom] staying in a hotel in Orlando tonight and hopping on a plane tomorrow is a great outcome,” he said. “And then there’s someone else on board who has a really important meeting that they need to be home for and taking a drive to Tampa to get on an alternate flight that’s leaving this evening might be their preferred outcome. …

“It’s a matter of pairing the individuals with the outcome that’s best for them. Historically, the only tool to do that has been a call center with human beings sitting at a telephone asking people, ‘What do you prefer? Let me go find that for you.’ While that works with a flight that’s disrupted, we tend not to have a flight disrupted at a time. It tends to be a storm cell that disrupts a dozen flights, so that solution just doesn’t scale and is a terrible experience for the customer.”

Sun Country’s solution? Have the system view the disrupted customer’s itinerary as a one-way voucher. Instead of being worth a specific dollar amount, the voucher can be used for any flight in the system. That allows customers to choose among flights leaving on different days or from different airports.

“You pick the one that works best for you, and we’re going to accept your previous itinerary as sufficient payment for that alternate travel plan,” Davis said, adding that plan includes single-use codes to help customers piece together what they need to complete the journey, such as a Lyft ride to an alternate airport.

“[With] AI, it’s not hard to imagine down the road we’ll be able to predict individual customers’ preferred outcome and deliver it for them versus sending them to the menu for truly self-service,” Davis concluded. “It’s a huge step in the right direction, but I’m still excited about where the future can go.”

Weaver elaborated on the challenges of transitioning to a more technological solution from a human-based system, such a Hyatt’s global property guest services, which customers can contact at any hour.

“There’s a huge human element in terms of the care that we have today,” he said. “As we embark down this journey of AI, that’s a real balance for us – not to lose that care along the way.”

Wise noted that the technology available today is better at some things than others. “An example of something they’re particularly good at today … is speech recognition, facial recognition, language recognition,” she said.

She offered an example of the last time she traveled into the United States. Cameras recognized her while walking through the customs hall. By the time she reached the border patrol agent, she was called by name and asked just a couple of things relevant to her trip before she was processed without inputting any personal data.

“It gives me huge hope in our industry,” she said, “because there’s a big organization that has lots and lots of legacy technology, and they’re enabling this type of change.”

Watch the video below to see the full discussion.