Hopper is a travel agency that partners with airlines, hotels, homes, and car rental providers, serving travelers in over 100 countries worldwide. Travel brands can also partner with HTS – the company’s B2B business – to optimize their direct channels by leveraging travel and fintech offerings.
Challenge
Effectively handle a wide range of unique and complex travel inquiries over the phone with instant and consistent phone support.
Solution
A genAI voice assistant that understands caller intent, answers hundreds of FAQs, and seamlessly transfers calls to agents when needed.
Result
PolyAI fully resolves 15% of Hopper’s call volume, providing immediate support to travelers 24/7 and allowing Hopper to scale their phone support while maintaining a great customer experience.
Challenge
Scaling phone support to meet customers where they are
Travel can be complicated, and when customers face complex issues, they often prefer calling for fast, personalized support. Hopper already offers comprehensive customer support through its app and website, ensuring travelers receive consistent and timely assistance. With an emphasis on expanding accessibility, Hopper aims to enhance its phone support capabilities, delivering reliable service across all channels to meet customer needs whenever they arise. Jo Lai, VP of Customer Experience at Hopper had a goal to provide customers with instant, consistent access to phone support with a solution that focused on resolution over containment, ensuring that customers were fully satisfied with the answers they received. The solution needed to encourage natural conversation and build trust, automating responses to FAQs while directing more complex issues to Hopper’s experienced travel agents.
Jo partnered with PolyAI due to their expertise in conversational AI and their ability to deliver a natural-sounding voice experience.
“We wanted to provide a highly consistent, near instant voice service to customers that could answer a limitless number of FAQs.”
Solution
A generative AI voice assistant that can answer unlimited FAQs
To address the unlimited range of questions that a Hopper customer might ask, PolyAI built a voice assistant that uses Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to reference Hopper’s existing knowledge base to find the answers. The assistant then uses PolyAI’s LLM to craft a personalized response based on the answers found. RAG acts as a safeguard to prevent inaccurate or irrelevant responses, and PolyAI’s robust safety guardrails ensure responses are always accurate and brand-safe.
The complex nature of travel means that there are many ways to ask the same question, and customers generally provide a lot more nuance when they speak than when they type. PolyAI’s proprietary technology stack is fine-tuned for understanding speech over the phone, regardless of background noise, phrasing, or accents, which means the voice assistant can understand customer intent regardless of how the question is phrased.

“The PolyAI voice assistant is exceptionally good at disambiguating what customers mean, even when they don’t have the right words to be able to convey what it is they’re asking about.”
Amazon Connect integration
Hopper uses Amazon Connect for their contact center platform, and PolyAI’s pre-built integration with Amazon Connect helped teams quickly test and implement connectivity between the two solutions. This integration enables the secure exchange of key information between Amazon Connect and PolyAI, allowing PolyAI voice assistants to personalize phone calls by accessing relevant details about the customer’s booking to assist callers, all while ensuring that sensitive data remains protected and is not transferred between platforms. When a call is handed off from PolyAI to a travel agent, the call is sent with relevant context, so customers don’t need to repeat information.
After evaluating other conversational AI options within the Amazon Connect ecosystem, Hopper chose to partner with PolyAI due to their extensive expertise in delivering exceptional voice experiences. This partnership allows Hopper to focus on providing outstanding travel services while PolyAI manages its voice assistant needs.
“We’ve been able to provide 24/7 voice with fast resolutions which allows customers to save time when managing their travels, and it frees up our agents to focus on more complex travel queries.”
Results
calls fully resolved by PolyAI
travel queries answered immediately by PolyAI instead of waiting for an agent
The PolyAI voice assistant allows Hopper to answer complex and nuanced travel questions over the phone immediately, 24/7. Currently, 15% of all inbound calls are fully resolved by the voice assistant, while the remaining calls are seamlessly transferred to Hopper’s travel agents to carry out more complex tasks, enhancing the overall productivity of the contact center and delivering a more efficient customer experience. The voice assistant demonstrates a high First-Contact Resolution (FCR) rate, comparable to Hopper’s travel agents, showing its effectiveness in accurately resolving customer queries.
“The PolyAI team were really aligned with what our vision was for the end customer, which was really important to us and helped our team to feel really comfortable working with them.”