- Gatwick chatbot’ provides flight information, flight specific notifications, and information on airport shops, restaurants and other facilities
- Currently responds to passenger queries in English but service will be extended to other languages next year
- Gatwick plans to enable the service on other chat platforms including WhatsApp and Apple Business Messenger in the future
LONDON, UK, 2019-Aug-07 — /Travel PR News/ — Gatwick Airport has launched a ‘Gatwick chatbot’ (referred to as Gail) on Facebook Messenger to provide passengers with easy access to flight information, flight specific notifications, and information on airport shops, restaurants and other facilities.
As an international airport, Gatwick Airport is also planning to offer the service in different languages next year.
The AI-enabled chatbot provides easy access to information before and during a trip. For instance, passengers can simply type their destination, select their flight from a list and then receive real-time updates on the status of that flight.
Gatwick collaborated within the VINCI Airports network throughout the project and in particular with Lyon-Saint Exupéry airport in France, which launched its chatbot in October 2017. This collaboration helped benchmark what the chatbot could be used for, questions passengers might ask and the value of features such as ‘quick response’. Additional learnings so far include:
Quality of conversations – currently, the Gatwick chatbot understands and answers about 80% of the questions it receives and within a year the chatbots of both Lyon-Saint Exupéry and Gatwick are expected to reach a new level of understanding, reaching around 95% by actively learning from interactions with users.
Customer experience – the Gatwick chatbot takes the experience further by integrating restaurants so that passengers looking for somewhere to eat before their flight can use the chatbot to help them find a suitable restaurant. For example – by asking “Which restaurants have vegetarian options?” users will be presented with a list of options. Other chatbots in VINCI Airports’ network are likely to benefit from learnings based on this this feature.
Multi-channel access – while both the Gatwick and Lyon-Saint Exupéry’s chatbots are available on Facebook Messenger, the Gatwick chatbot will be tested on platforms such as WhatsApp and Apple Business Messenger, while Lyon has focused on web and mobile channels – an approach that will develop further knowledge and best-practice sharing.
Abhi Chacko, Head of Innovation at Gatwick, said: “Our passengers are at the core of everything we do and the aim of this AI-enabled chatbot is to make it easy for them to get airport and flight related information. We have only just rolled this service out on Facebook Messenger but we expect that it will become popular and the chatbot will learn rapidly using artificial intelligence as an increasing number of our passengers use it.
“More globally, experience across VINCI Airports’ network of 46 airports in 12 countries demonstrates that well-designed chatbots successfully engage passengers and can satisfy many of their needs. We believe there is significant potential for chatbots to facilitate, personalise and enrich each passenger’s end-to-end experience across multiple touchpoints.”
About Gatwick Airport
Gatwick is the UK’s second largest airport. It serves more than 230 destinations in 74 countries for 46 million passengers a year on short and long-haul point-to-point services. Gatwick is also a major economic driver and generates around 85,000 jobs nationally, with 24,000 of these located on the airport.
Since May 2019, a new long-term partnership was formed with VINCI Airports who purchased a 50.01% stake in the airport. This partnership sees Gatwick Airport integrate into the network of VINCI Airports, the leading private airport operator in the world, which manages the development and operation of 46 airports across the globe. Served by around 250 airlines, VINCI Airports’ network handled 240 million passengers in 2018 – including traffic at London Gatwick. VINCI Airports develops, finances, builds and operates airports, leveraging its investment capability, international network and know-how to optimise performance of existing airport infrastructure, facility extensions and new-build construction projects.
Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), which manages the remaining 49.99% interest in Gatwick, is an independent infrastructure investor that makes equity investments in high quality infrastructure assets in the energy, transport and water/waste sectors. GIP has US$56 billion of Assets under Management. Its 18 portfolio companies operate in over 50 countries with circa 54,000 employees and generate annual revenues of circa US$50 billion.
For more information on VINCI Airports please www.vinci-airports.com and for more information on GIP please visit http://global-infra.com.
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Source: GATWICK AIRPORT