Startup employees and self-employed lack dedicated solutions for business travel and spend hours on the trip planning and booking process. Business trip booking and invoicing is scattered through many different B2C platforms and expensing apps. With Swifty, Lufthansa Innovation Hub has built the first autonomous AI assistant in the travel industry. Swifty not only seamlessly manages travel planning and streamlines invoicing, but also executes booking and payment procedures. Swifty allows its customers to book their business trips in 5 minutes using native chat interface. The launch of Swifty marks the first step on the way of building a comprehensive AI business travel assistant capable of catering to any queries that arise during business trips.
How Swifty works
Swifty focuses on speed, productivity and efficiency by helping business travellers to book their trips in minutes via chatting with an AI assistant. Users can start a new chat, share their flight and hotel preferences and select the most suitable options from a shortlist. After that, the AI assistant books the selected option for the user and shares the trip itinerary with travel documents and receipts in one place. No more tedious invoicing requests or navigating complex platforms – Swifty streamlines the entire process, freeing up time and energy to focus on meaningful work. For its launch, Swifty proudly announces Expedia Group as its exclusive lodging partner for its hotel supply, offering Swifty customers access to hundreds of thousands of properties around the world. Connection to another travel partner allows Swifty to access flight options from 90 percent of US and European airlines.
The Technology behind Swifty
Swifty’s AI agent is based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model and trained to clearly interpret travel-related context and booking intent of the user. Simply put, Swifty engineers transformed the AI language model into a set of travel booking and support agents, working together. These agents can chat with users, and even reliably carry out concrete actions, such as booking hotels and flights. AI is enabled to take actions by capturing and interpreting the user’s intent to act, validating its correctness and triggering code that is connected to the travel booking systems. To ensure a smooth and efficient booking experience, Swifty interacts with services such as Expedia’s online travel booking system to carefully select the best choices from a wide range of options, putting an end to decision fatigue connected to picking the right hotel or flight.
Building a comprehensive AI business travel assistant catering to any business travel query
Over time, Swifty will expand its features to include services such as train bookings, local transportation, such as taxi or shared mobility options, CO2 compensation and more. However, Swifty aims to go beyond just transportation and accommodation, and will address a wide range of needs: reserving restaurants and coworking spaces; ordering gifts and printing services, or scheduling complex meetings via calendar integration.
