For the last thirty years, businesses have competed on three things: price, product and convenience.
The internet made comparison shopping effortless, Amazon redefined convenience, and AI is now making it possible for almost every business to produce good marketing, good websites, good sales copy and even good customer support at a fraction of the cost it once required.
Undoubtedly, the lovely Ryanair will see it as an opportunity to cut costs. As with their flights, they will no doubt be brutally efficient, using AI agents to answer every customer service call instantly, without empathy, and offering no option to switch to a human agent. To be fair, there is nothing wrong with this approach, but I personally think that in an AI-dominated world, exceptional customer care will be one of the few genuine competitive advantages left.
That may sound like a contradiction given my promotion of AI Tools, which are incredibly good at answering questions, solving problems and responding instantly, twenty-four hours a day, in every language imaginable. At Neural Voice, we’ve demonstrated exactly that by creating AI voice agents capable of holding natural conversations with customers in over forty languages, with response times measured in fractions of a second. The technology is simply remarkable.
But technology is not what builds a brand; it’s humans.
I think that customer-centric airlines like Jet2 and Easyjet will use AI not just to replace humans but to supercharge their humans with co-pilots that, at a minimum, double their productivity, allowing them more time to talk to customers and guide them through both the holiday booking process and in-resort.
Think about your own experience talking to customer service departments. I’m sure you weren’t looking for someone to simply read information from a screen, but rather wanted your problem understood, ownership taken, and a solution delivered quickly.
AI is becoming brilliant at the first part, but humans are still significantly better at the second element, delivering a solution, because, let’s be honest, AI not only makes us sound bland but also tends to play it safe and avoid making decisions. This is why the Travel Voice customer service solution uses AI voice to answer the initial call and communicate all basic information, but then triages the customer’s issue into a priority response list that is passed to human agents to respond to. This co-pilot approach supercharges human agents by giving them all the information they need, allowing them to handle 3 times as many calls that require their human empathy and decision-making skills.
This allows our partner business to build stronger customer relationships by removing the frustration of long wait times whilst still maintaining human-to-human customer service, which, in our opinion, really stands out. For example, in an emergency such as war breaking out in Iran, when no UK airline could cope with the surge in customer service calls, they delivered an awful, brand-damaging service that could have been avoided if they had already implemented Travel Voice AI’s first solution.
However, Ryanair proves that it’s not just service that customers buy into, because millions switch to them based on £10-£20 price savings.
Unfortunately, I am prime evidence of this, as just a few years ago, I hated Ryanair with a passion after a litany of Covid-19-related dirty tricks. Broken cancellation buttons, understated brought-forward balances, and a rip-off £95 amendment fee per seat, not to mention refunds that never seem to appear in your bank account, did not sit well with me as a customer.
Yet today I’m back to booking half my flights with Ryanair because they offer the best flight times and prices on short-haul routes, where, to me, airlines are little more than bus services with little differentiation. However, I would never take this laissez-faire attitude to booking a long-haul flight or a package holiday, so the need for customer service needs to be contextualised based on the product being sold.
Similarly, I am happy to book simple trips online, but I used a trusted human Travel Solution Network (TSN) homeworker to book this year’s complex family holiday, involving multiple departure airports and varying durations, because we simply could not afford to get it wrong.
Some businesses, like On the Beach, proudly position themselves as digital-first and stubbornly refuse to offer a phone-booking option, seeing it as unnecessary and undermining this stance. However, TSN has proven to both major airlines and other OTAs that adding a prominent telephone number actually increases online conversion by boosting customer confidence that, although they are booking online without human assistance, they can contact the business by phone in emergencies or if they need to change their plans. So, it’s just the hinted availability of human assistance that drives increased conversion.
Interestingly, I believe AI could widen this gap even further between airlines like Jet2 and Easyjet, who care, and the uncaring Ryanair, because rather than reducing human interaction, it can be used to increase it.
Instead of wasting hours on repetitive emails, database searches, or administrative tasks, staff can focus on the conversations that genuinely require empathy, judgment, and commercial thinking, and that allow humans to talk to customers when they need assistance and human empathy.
However, I see many businesses still making the opposite choice.
They view AI too simplistically as a cost-cutting exercise, able to reduce headcount whilst hiding behind chatbots that frustrate customers and make it almost impossible to speak to someone who can help.
In my opinion, this is very short-sighted, as although it may improve this year’s profits and even impress the city, it will erode the trust that took you years to build.
History repeatedly shows that businesses rarely lose customers because of a single mistake. They lose them because customers feel nobody cared enough to put things right.
That principle isn’t changing because of AI, but if anything, it becomes even more important.
As AI levels the playing field by giving every company access to extraordinary technology, the emotional connection between customers and brands becomes increasingly valuable. Trust, responsiveness, accountability and genuine ownership are becoming scarce commodities.
So, cost-focused and cynical businesses like Ryanair may be asking how many customer service staff AI can replace. I think they are asking the wrong question because the better question is one that I think is not in their DNA,
How can AI give every member of our team more time to delight customers than any of our competitors?
Customer delight is what builds a long-term, sustainable Brand, not just low prices, because sooner or later somebody else will turn up with newer and bigger aircraft that can deliver lower prices, rendering your price proposition redundant.
AI will change many things, but it cannot replace trust, which I think is travel companies’ superpower. This trust needs to be earned over many years and often stems from the quality of human interactions, so I think the humans in travel still have a major role to play and a healthy future.