“Just get me close, and I’ll figure it out from there.” Faced with delays, cancellations, or even just high fares, many travelers have gone through this process of searching out alternative airports to get as close as possible to their ideal destination. Now United Airlines wants to help automate that search process, launching an AI-driven solution dubbed “Get me close.”
Teased by VP Customer Strategy & Innovation Jennifer Schwierzke at Future Travel Experience 2024 in Dublin this week, the effort aims to proactively offer travelers alternate routes or destinations, based on a blend of factors, including willingness to drive (or, presumably, use public transit, though odds of that being useful in most of United’s network are low) to complete the trip:
Think about a scenario: You’re at an airport. You’re stranded. There’s rain storm or ground delay program, and maybe you’re trying to get to a wedding or a funeral. We’re going to use some AI technology called “get me close.” You add parameters like how far you’re willing to drive and other factors around how you can get as close as possible. A lot employee pass travelers are already really good at this; we want to automate some of that for our customers.
The ultimate goal is to make life easier for passengers. That includes handling IROPS, of course, but also potentially new flight bookings. More experienced travelers might already know to search alternate airports, for example. Adding an optional “willing to drive” threshold in the search process could open up new route options. United wants to push that more, capturing an increased share of price-sensitive passengers and those who might have some flexibility in travel timing, among other considerations.
A secondary goal Schwierzke described is to have passengers become more comfortable depending on United’s technology rather than always engaging with a human when things go sideways. By demonstrating that the system can serve the more flexible routings, the hope is that more travelers will self-service out of trouble given the opportunity. That reduces costs, improves NPS scores (Schwierzke noted that on IROPS days passengers who can self-help with the United app score 26 points higher in NPS), and generally keeps the system running smoother.
The idea of a nearby city search is not new. Similar offerings exist on metasearch engines and some airlines. Even United already has similar functionality with its award search engine, offering nearby airports for some results if the primary destination is not available (it recently offered me flights to Hannover instead of Hamburg, Germany, about 90 minutes away by train). American Airlines does, too. Indeed, American made news a couple years ago rebooking a family to an alternate airport just 42 miles away, but in a different island country. Giving travelers the ability to control the alternate airport search parameters is much less common.
And calling it AI is probably a stretch. Doing the calculations in the background to find available routings to alternate airports depends on data, of course. And anything data-related is AI today. Still, it is nice to see another search option coming, especially when automating the process can potentially save a disrupted trip.
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