From Conversation to Capability: Closing the AI Execution Gap in Travel

LOUISE STEVENS, VP MARKETING, WENRIX / JANUARY 20, 2025

The travel industry is moving fast on AI. It feels like every other day someone is announcing a new chatbot or AI assistant to improve travel search and selling.
But the hardest problem remains unsolved: servicing.

That gap — between what travelers ask for and what the industry can actually execute — is the AI execution gap.

The moment a traveler asks for something operational — a refund, a waiver, a complex change — automation breaks down and work falls back to humans. Not because AI can’t understand the request, but because the execution layer underneath isn’t built to handle real-world complexity.

At the Phocuswright Conference, Rob Brown, Chief Strategy Officer at Wenrix, explains how our work in pricing and flexibility inevitably led us into servicing. To give agencies a real competitive edge, we had to automate what didn’t yet exist — the hardest parts of the workflow: interpreting fare rules, tax refundability, waivers, and disruptions across all content sources, and executing across refunds, exchanges, disruptions, no-shows, ancillary upsells, and booking inquiries — including the edge cases.

Watch the full interview to hear why execution, not conversation, will define the next phase of AI in travel — and how Wenrix DeepFlow was built to close the gap.