Flight Centre Travel Group

At Flight Centre we are known for our long-standing experience in the travel industry and our commitment to making travel accessible and enjoyable for everyone. For 43 years we have been Australia’s largest travel retailer and today, in 2025, we are recognised as Australia’s Most Trusted Travel Agency*.

We have a global community of approximately 2500 of Flight Centre travel experts (our consultants). These experts are largely highly experienced, passionate travel experts with deep product knowledge and specialisations in various aspects of travel, ensuring personalised and seamless travel planning for their customers.

Problem/Scenario:
We already had AI/machine learning models that leverage our FC historical booking and other company-specific data to rank the popularity of hotels with our customers and we wanted to find a way to get that information to our experts during consultation to improve hotel attachment rates. This was our first attempt at asking, “Can AI-powered product recommendations influence a consultant’s product sales process?”

As a bricks and mortar retailer, we invest heavily in recruitment to onboard, develop and retain our global workforce of travel experts. L&D efforts to train the variety of products and destinations are challenging with limited resources. At any given time, approximately 20% of our workforce will be novice first year consultants who need high product support as they develop their knowledge base and learn our systems. As a mass generalist travel retailer, we’d identified an opportunity to leverage AI to help all our consultants establish themselves as “experts” in all destinations. We needed a scalable solution for expanding product expertise for a range that globally changes with high frequency and seasonality. At the time, a daily “hotline” product news alert was the only current method for updating agents on product ranges, which is low in effectiveness and engagement.

Alongside this, as a retail business we wanted to double down on our component strategy to grow our average basket size; a strategy that allows top line growth at the same time as delighting our customers with our Flight Centre expertise.

Solution:
The idea was to move fast by leveraging WalkMe as a portal to facilitate communicating the system data to our AI engines to return a recommended next best sales step. WalkMe provides our travel experts with in-time training/insights/recommendations to provide contextual reasons why this is a good recommendation for a customer.

Conclusion:
The WalkMe approach minimizes cost to market, creating minimal barriers for ROI. This solution allows us to quickly address the need for scalable product expertise and improve the overall sales process.

*Roy Morgan Risk Report, February 2025.

Key High-Level Requirements/Workflow:

• WalkMe to trigger at key points of the sales journey when a review of the basket is required (e.g., saving a quote, converting to booking).
• WalkMe to identify key booking metadata (product types, price, date, city codes, number of passengers, etc.).
• WalkMe sends this data to the FC AI API endpoint.

WalkMe was the vehicle to bring our AI/Machine learning models to our users. We could place the solution directly in the system our travel experts were booking in and use the data in that booking to feed into the AI models and retrieve recommendations based on our 43+ years of travel expertise.
We were able to provide self-serve and invisible launchers is optimum places within the users’ workflow to launch SWTs that scraped data from the booking and opened an ActionBot

Our partnership with WalkRunners meant we were able to utilize their expertise, attention to deal and best practice to have the ActionBot hidden and still take the data and connect to an API that was then fed into the AI models. The responses were then passed back through API and received by the ActionBot and then displayed to the user.

Now when a consultant creates a standard flight booking instead of trying to recall which of the one million+ hotels in the system would be best, WalkMe surfaces the top 3 hotels recommended for the destination and passenger type segments. This allows them to have knowledgeable discussions with the customer on their accommodation needs, ensures more bookings contain a hotel component and the consultant is free to spend more time helping more customers with their travel dreams.

We used a custom WalkMe Insights Dashboard to track our pilot and assess effectiveness.

Initial results:

• 67 consultants targeted in pilot (2.5% of target workforce)
• 5 scenarios presented with self-serve launchers in two strategic places and 3 invisible launchers in key points of the workflow.
• 345 Recommendations triggered
• 39% of pilot consultants gave the recommendation a “thumbs up” rating to indicate this was a useful suggestion and hotels they would choose.

Flow Analytics tracked views of the recommendations and the following steps taken so we could report that 51% of the pilot users commenced a hotel search (ideal outcome) after the recommendations.

The sentiment from the pilot has been overwhelmingly positive. The AI-powered recommendations have been particularly beneficial for our novice consultants, helping them understand where to start and bridging the experience gap with certain properties or destinations. This boost in confidence aligns perfectly with our mission to connect novices with the expertise of experienced consultants and make sure each customer sees us as their centre for travel.

Experienced consultants have also found value in the system, appreciating the reminders to have the right conversations with their customers and to consider popular hotels they may not have used recently. This ensures that all consultants, regardless of experience level, can provide expert advice, enhancing our operational efficiency.

Users are delighted that WalkMe integrates seamlessly into their existing workflow, keeping all necessary information within the same system they are already using. This integration has unlocked significant potential for improving our processes and reducing admin down time.

Our product leaders are thrilled with the initial results of the pilot, noting how it has effectively increased product attachment on bookings.

Flight Centre is positioned in a league of its own as a modern travel retailer with both a bricks and mortar shop network as well as online booking capability. We are on a mission to embrace AI to create simplicity for our people so their time can be better spent on creating amazing travel experiences.
One of our core values is Ownership, and leveraging WalkMe allows our consultants to retain autonomy over their customers’ itineraries, while being able to access insights and data to make curated recommendations that suit each of our travellers.

WalkMe has been a transformative success for our company, revolutionising how our consultants engage with technology. Our exclusive brand, Avery, has spearheaded this digital adoption, achieving an impressive 99% engagement rate and facilitating 1.3 million interactions per month within our booking system alone. This remarkable engagement demonstrates our ability to seamlessly integrate static guidance and automation, significantly boosting consultant productivity and leaving them eager for more.

The next step was to showcase Avery Insights (AI), highlighting its potential and flexibility as a reliable tool to support our innovative goals. By leveraging WalkMe, we have successfully bridged our current systems with AI, enabling real-time data flow from live bookings to our AI models. This integration has unblocked our AI/Machine Learning teams from their dependency on development teams, eliminating delays and empowering them to retrieve the necessary inputs instantly through WalkMe.

The success of this project has paved the way for future AI initiatives, underscoring our commitment to using cutting-edge technology for the benefit of our customers. WalkMe’s ability to provide dynamic, in-the-moment support has not only enhanced our operational efficiency but also reinforced our position as a forward-thinking company dedicated to innovation and excellence.

It was great to be able to show the capabilities of WalkMe to such an expert team. All eyes are on AI in our company, industry and the world and we provided a solution months ahead of any dev work that could be attempted internally.

We are now growing the solution based on user feedback and stakeholder comments to provide even more information and it allows our AI team to perfect their models and evolve them even further with other connections.

We continue to innovate with WalkMe to develop the ideas of our consultants, exploring different parts of the system to surface the information, additional details on existing balloons and additional balloons as well as automation launched directly from those balloons to drive the hotel search and provide a smooth flow from the WalkMe recommendation back into the next best step for the consultant.

We’re the flagship brand of the Flight Centre Travel Group (FCTG), an Australian-born global travel powerhouse that’s grown from a single shop to Australia’s Most Trusted Travel Agency – according to Roy Morgan’s 2024 Risk Report. Flight Centre opened its first retail shop in Sydney, Australia in 1982, followed by the UK in 1984, New Zealand in 1987, South Africa in 1994, and Canada in 1995.

FCTG is one of the world’s largest travel retailers and corporate travel managers.  The company, which is headquartered in Brisbane, employs about 15,000 people globally and has company-owned leisure and/or corporate travel business in 25 countries, spanning Australia/New Zealand (ANZ), the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia.   FLT listed on the Australian Securities Exchange in 1995. Today, it has a market capitalisation in the order of $AU4.5 billion.