It’s Friday night at Kempegowda International Airport. A traveller is trying to find answers after his flight gets delayed, moving between the MakeMyTrip and IndiGo apps. 

He didn’t receive any update about the delay. His hotel in Goa needs him to check in by a certain time. The chatbot isn’t helping, the airline helpline has a 45-minute wait, and his cab driver in Goa doesn’t know he’s running late. 

With India’s online travel market expected to reach $55.7 billion in 2025 and most bookings happening on mobile, getting on a flight or booking a room has never been easier. 

But the moment a flight is delayed or a refund goes missing, the experience starts to break down. What started as a simple booking now involves multiple companies — the OTA, airline, hotel, cab service, and airport. Most of them can’t see the same customer information or what has already happened. 

Instead of getting help, the traveller spends time repeating the same story to multiple agents and service providers. 

The Blinkit Problem in Travel: Real-Time Service Expectations

Indian consumers today expect instant experiences, the kind they get every time they order biryani or groceries online using a quick commerce app: 

  • Zomato shows customers exactly where their food is, from kitchen to doorstep. 
  • PhonePe confirms transactions in under two seconds and flags anything suspicious before you’ve noticed it yourself. 
  • Swiggy Instamart resolves fulfillment issues inside the app, with no call center, no hold music, and no explanations. 

These apps have led millions of Indian consumers to expect real-time, context-aware service as the baseline. When those same consumers are stranded at a gate at 5:00 AM in an unfamiliar city, they expect the same speed, visibility and support from their travel provider. 

The problem is that customer expectations have changed much faster than travel operations. Booking a trip has become simple but getting help when something goes wrong often isn’t.

In December 2025, millions of Indian travellers experienced this first-hand. The cancellation of over 5,700 IndiGo flights led to a surge in refund requests, re-bookings and customer support enquiries. Many travellers struggled to get timely updates or clear answers when they needed them most. Instead, they were often left waiting for information and support when they expected: 

  • Timely updates about their flight
  • Clear options if they needed to rebook
  • A clear timeline for receiving a refund
  • Support agents who already knew their situation
  • Answers without being transferred from one team to another

 

For travel companies, these moments matter because they directly affect customer loyalty. A traveller may forget a smooth booking experience, but they rarely forget spending hours chasing updates after a cancelled flight. 

 

The Problem With Travel’s Post-Booking Experience 

A typical long weekend trip booked on ixigo can involve five different organisations: the travel platform, airline, hotel, cab service, and airport. Each uses its own systems and keeps its own customer information. As a result, they often struggle to share context when something goes wrong.

When the trip goes smoothly, these disconnected systems stay hidden. But when a flight is delayed, cancelled or rescheduled, the traveller is often left trying to connect the dots. They explain the same issue to the airline, travel platform and hotel. They switch between chat, email, and phone calls, repeating the same information each time.

Meanwhile, support teams are trying to keep up with cancellations, refunds, itinerary changes, and general enquiries across WhatsApp, email, phone, and app-based support. An agent handling a call may have no visibility into the email the customer sent yesterday. The airline may not know what the OTA has already promised. The hotel may have no idea the traveller’s flight has been delayed.

The customer sees one trip. The agents on the other end genuinely can’t see what happened on another channel or with another provider. They’re responding to the traveller’s frustration with what they have, which is usually very little. In the meantime, customer care teams are trying to handle cancellations, refunds, itinerary changes and general questions across WhatsApp, email, phone, and the app at the same time, with no single, unified view of the customer.  

The result is longer wait times, more repeat contacts, and frustrated customers who feel like nobody knows what’s going on. 

 

Omnichannel Engagement in Travel: What “Connected” Actually Looks Like in Practice

Travel companies don’t need more channels; they need the channels they already have to work together. A traveller who starts with a chatbot, sends an email, and later calls support doesn’t expect to explain the same problem three times. They expect the company to already know what happened.

An agent picking up a refund call should already be able to see the chat with airline support from the day before, and the email sent that morning. That means less time searching for information, fewer transfers, and faster resolutions.

 

This is where cloud-based, AI-enabled experience orchestration helps: it provides a unified view of customer interactions across channels and teams. Using artificial intelligence (AI), you can link every customer interaction, across every channel and group, into one coordinated path. The stranded traveller gets routed to the right resource who has a complete view of their history, no matter where the chat started or with whom. 

And instead of waiting for customers to place a call, the platform can proactively reach out in advance, via a disruption alert, a re-booking choice, or a refund status message. In practice, this kind of integration creates a few clear operational advantages:

  • Accurate routing: Calls are routed to the best available resource across contact centers, outsourcers, travel agencies and remote workers, not just whoever picks up first.
  • Proactive outreach: Travellers get re-booking confirmations, itinerary updates and delay alerts by phone, message or email, well before they realise something’s wrong.
  • Channel continuity: Context follows the traveller across chat, email, co-browse and voice, so the conversation doesn’t begin from scratch every time they switch.
  • Smarter prioritisation: Work is distributed among agents based on travel date, issue type and customer history, not just queue length.
  • Workforce visibility: Teams across front and back office can be planned, monitored and adjusted to absorb disruption spikes without the service quality collapsing.

Real-World Travel CX Success Stories

AI-powered orchestration is already delivering measurable operational improvements.; here are a few practical examples: 

  • The Etraveli Group, a global OTA operating across 75 countries with nearly 2,800 employees, spent years running fragmented support systems inherited through acquisitions. After consolidating onto the Genesys Cloud platform, agents could handle inbound calls, outbound follow-ups, chat and email from a single desktop, instead of switching between systems mid-conversation. That meant less time navigating multiple tools and more time helping customers. 
  • SITA, which provides IT infrastructure to airlines and airports in more than 150 countries, centralised contact management from all those locations into one environment. The result: SIP traffic switchover dropped to five minutes, voice team efficiency improved by up to 50%, and emergency response times got significantly faster. 
  • Aeromexico, a leading Latin American airline, elevated its contact center by moving to the cloud. This allowed them to gain complete visibility into customer interactions and real-time access to data. Customers can now connect to the agent with the right knowledge to resolve the issue, eliminating the need for them to repeat the same information, resulting in a 55% higher Net Promoter Score (NPS). Customers no longer had to repeat the same information to multiple agents, helping improve both service quality and customer satisfaction. 
  • Adopting the Genesys Cloud™ platform helped Cathay support the airline’s 1,500 advisors across multiple global hubs. With this implementation, the company could improve forecasting accuracy by 90%. 
  • Virgin Atlantic experienced a similar outcome once it implemented the Genesys Cloud Platform: a 5-point increase in CSAT, 220% more interactions handled, 40% reduction in agent attrition, and 10% more conversations. 

Modernise the Journey Beyond the Booking

Travel apps in India are competing for the same customers. Prices are often similar across platforms, and switching from one app to another takes only a few taps. That means the experience you provide can make all the difference. When a flight is cancelled at 6:00 AM, when a refund hasn’t arrived in three weeks, or when the hotel has no record of a booking – that’s when travellers find out whether a platform is actually worth staying with.

If you’re looking to build that kind of trust and loyalty, make sure customer information follows the traveller across channels. Give agents the context they need before they answer a call or message. And keep customers informed, so they don’t have to chase updates themselves. 

The booking experience you offer is already seamless. The real competitive advantage now lies in what happens after the booking, when customer expectations are highest, and loyalty is at risk. 

 

FAQs

 

How can we reduce customer complaints after flight cancellations?

When disruptions hit, it is important to deliver proactive alerts, clear refund timelines, and agents who can see the full interaction history before picking up the call.

 

How can we improve post-booking customer experience in travel?

Start by connecting your existing channels, so context carries forward, and your customers do not have to repeat themselves each time. 

 

What’s the best way to handle high call volumes during travel disruptions?

Prioritise contacts by departure date and issue urgency, automate status updates so routine queries don’t overwhelm your agents. At the same time, build proactive outreach into your workflow so travellers hear from you before they come looking.