House of Travel has begun piloting an AI-powered ticket change tool with its New Zealand ticketing team, in a move that could significantly cut the time PTMs spend on one of travel’s top pain points.
The trial also offers a glimpse of where the group expects AI to take over more transactional work within phone-based customer service.
Built over House of Travel’s existing Amadeus API infrastructure, the tool allows a consultant to request a change in plain English rather than manually navigating fare rules and calculating change fees.
A consultant enters a booking’s PNR and types a request, such as ‘I would like to move the flight to 3pm tomorrow’. The tool then returns matching flights along with the fare difference, tax difference and any airline change fee, ready to confirm.
The tool went into pilot with the ticketing team supporting House of Travel’s 70 leisure stores in New Zealand on the day Travel Weekly spoke to Mark Leadbetter, head of IT for House of Travel Australia and New Zealand, who demonstrated it live.
“Before, they’d have to go into Amadeus and they’d have to understand what type of fare it was, and then they’d have to understand all the fees that they had to charge around that,” Leadbetter said.
“This makes it a really commercial, customer-facing tool – here’s my fare that I’ve changed, here’s what I’ve changed it to, and these are the costs of it.”
What it means for PTMs
For PTMs, the tool targets a task Leadbetter describes as an “absolute nightmare” to manage at volume – ticket reissues that traditionally require detailed knowledge of fare types and manual calculation of what the industry calls “air call” fees.
Automating that calculation, he said, is about giving consultants time back rather than cutting headcount.
“It could free up time to actually get time back at the end of the day, so they’re not working nights,” Leadbetter said.
“But it could also free up time that they can actually do more booking and spend more time with the customer.”
The ticket-change tool sits alongside a broader AI build-out inside House of Travel’s tech stack, including a new large language model – internally called “the Brain” – that layers live search and live availability over conversational itinerary requests.
House of Travel has also been developing TripBuilder, a booking platform where consultants can generate a draft itinerary directly from a TikTok or YouTube link.
House of Travel has previously said its HoT Brain platform is designed to streamline consultant workflows and integrate with the systems they use daily, including live travel content and internal knowledge databases.
The next step: AI answering the phone
Leadbetter said the ticket-change pilot is an early step towards AI-agent-led customer service, particularly in the corporate travel space, where he expects call-handling to increasingly shift towards AI agents fielding transactional requests directly.
“In the future, they’ll ring up, an AI will answer the phone. You won’t know it’s an AI, and you’ll be talking to that AI, and you’ll go, ticket change, and it’ll bring up this agent here to do your ticket change,” he said.
“And it’ll do it all in the background. Whereas if it couldn’t do something, then it’ll hand it off to a person.”
He pointed to Microsoft’s conversational AI tools as an example of technology already sophisticated enough that a caller would not necessarily know they were not speaking to a person.
Leisure travel, he said, is likely to remain more relationship-driven for longer, given the more personal nature of those bookings.
Guardrails
Leadbetter was clear that the shift comes with caveats.
He named two specific risks he is watching: AI-enabled cyber fraud, including deepfake video and voice impersonation sophisticated enough to convincingly imitate an executive on a call; and over-reliance on AI recommendations without a consultant applying their own judgment.
For example, a consultant might accept an AI-generated hotel recommendation without knowing the property is undergoing renovations.
“You’re still responsible for the output,” he said. “Just make sure you add that human touch.”
House of Travel’s IT division, based in Christchurch, has been building AI tools internally for around two and a half years and is now working on its second generation of tools.
The six-person specialist AI team sits within a wider IT group of roughly 60 to 65 staff.
