For global travel and hospitality brands, customer experience (CX) is a complex, multinational orchestration of journeys. At Our Vacation Centre—a prominent travel loyalty provider under the global Arrivia umbrella—managing these dynamics involves coordinating a highly distributed, multilingual footprint.
In an industry vulnerable to sudden geopolitical shifts and changing consumer habits, the organisation has shifted its focus away from traditional agent staffing models. Instead, it is embracing an evolving, AI-driven digital transformation aimed at eliminating administrative friction and transitioning from transactional customer service to a premium concierge model.
The organisation’s international operations span offices and contact centres across Australia, New Zealand, the Asia-Pacific region (including Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam), India, and Portugal. Tasked with maintaining data protection, PCI compliance, and overseeing the Project Management Office (PMO) for these far-reaching regions is the Executive Manager for Projects and Compliance, Ric Duchateau.
“When I joined Our Vacation Centre, I spent roughly the first two years conducting extensive business analysis and delivering data-driven insights. Over the years, the role shifted into project management, ultimately leading to my appointment as the Executive Manager for Projects and Compliance for Arrivia International Operations. In this capacity, my remit covers the Australia-Pacific region, New Zealand, and widespread operations throughout Asia”.
While working alongside a dedicated operations stream, Ric manages a cross-functional, cross-skilled team that spans project management, telephony restructuring, and compliance, allowing them to flexibly deploy resources across different areas of the business wherever needed.
The evolution of an AI strategy
The organisation’s approach to Artificial Intelligence reflects a pragmatism in regards to navigating rapid technological shifts. Six months ago, the internal perception of their AI maturity was vastly different from the operational reality they face today.
Rather than viewing AI as a static, architectural replacement, leadership views it as an ongoing learning process. The current strategy focuses strictly on identifying and resolving specific system bottlenecks to free human agents from low-value, repetitive inquiries.
“Consumers are not necessarily looking for a human to solve their problem 100% of the time,” notes Duchateau. “If they are going to have to wait half an hour for somebody to get back to them, and there’s a tool or a system that can help them solve the problem right there and then, they’re happy to use an AI solution.”
To execute this strategy, Our Vacation Centre heavily prioritised the structure of its backend data. Having completed this foundation, the company is now deploying its initial AI implementations to shift human talent toward high-value, high-touch customer interactions.
Duchateau comments, “The organisation recognises the need to address specific system bottlenecks, noting that relying on increased staffing is less efficient than utilising the tools currently available. Accordingly, the current strategy involves evaluating available options and laying the necessary groundwork. Having invested significant effort into correctly structuring the backend data and training the system, the company is now deploying its first operational AI bot. The immediate focus is on resolving the core bottlenecks that handle low-value tasks, thereby freeing up both agents and members to focus on high-value interactions”.
Intelligent triage and cross-border consistency
To anchor its AI operations, Our Vacation Centre utilises Zendesk’ Resolution Platform. This unified technology stack has introduced several key capabilities across their global centres, including:
Intelligent triage: The platform automatically reviews and prioritises incoming tickets across an omnichannel environment (including email, SMS, and social media), ensuring that critical customer issues are escalated immediately.”The organisation is now able to analyse all inbound tickets. Instead of having to manually fish for details regarding what is being discussed, we can easily see real-time customer interests and trending topics. This capability allows us to track global trends and evaluate whether current world events, such as the situation in the Middle East, are impacting consumer travel sentiment and behaviour”, says Duchateau.
Multilingual translation: Operating across multiple countries with diverse languages presents inherent service challenges. The integration allows agents who may not speak a customer’s native language to translate, interpret, and accurately respond to inquiries in the required language, establishing a consistent baseline of service globally.
Trend and sentiment analysis: By configuring specific entities within their reporting suites, management can track global customer sentiment in real time. For instance, the company can instantly evaluate how ongoing geopolitical tensions in regions like the Middle East are impacting consumer travel enquiries and destinations of interest.
The human-AI handover
Determining exactly when an automated interaction should transition to a human agent remains one of the most critical challenges in modern CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) strategies. Rather than enforcing absolute automation, Our Vacation Centre employs strict sentiment and value thresholds.
The system is configured to flag specific phrases, keywords, or negative changes in user sentiment during an active chat session. The moment an automated interaction drops below a predetermined satisfaction threshold, or when the system identifies a query as a high-value contact, the platform automatically routes the user to a live agent.
While leadership acknowledges that these parameters will continue to undergo refinement over the next several years, the current priority is maintaining customer choice and preventing user frustration.
Securing employee buy-In via peer evangelism
Technology deployment often fails not from architectural flaws, but from organisational inertia. To prevent this, Our Vacation Centre structured its AI business case around frontline feedback.
The project team bypassed typical top-down corporate mandates, actively interviewing frontline team leaders, team captains, and floor agents to identify everyday workplace frustrations. By the time the implementation phase began, the platform was explicitly designed to solve the problems already raised by the staff.
“When we did the business case and were deciding about who we’re going to go with, we went through and did a bit of a strategy around where we want to go and what bottlenecks we have. A lot of those issues we’re dealing with now were taken from feedback from our staff and leaders within the business—and when I say leaders, I’m talking not necessarily senior leadership, but more of the frontline team leaders, team captains, and people closer to the human interactions we deal with on a day-to-day basis”, says Duchateau.
In collaboration with Zendesk, the company conducted design and implementation workshops featuring cross-functional representation from every global region. Frontline staff worked directly alongside technical teams and project managers.
“When we got to the point of implementing it, we worked with the Zendesk team to do workshops about how we were going to approach things. We knew what the problem was, but we needed to figure out how to solve it. We involved floor agents, frontline admin staff, and team leaders, as well as the appropriate technical and project people. We had people from each of the teams, each of the regions, and each infrastructure involved in it.”
Consequently, these floor agents became natural champions and subject matter experts (SMEs) at a peer level. When the training rolled out across the wider workforce, peer-to-peer evangelism dismantled resistance far more effectively than any directive from senior leadership could have achieved.
Scaling Quality Assurance (QA) from 5% to 100%
Historically, the organisation’s QA mirrored traditional industry frameworks – a dedicated off-side team manually reviewed roughly 5% of calls and text interactions each month.
“That architecture has been completely overhauled”, says Duchateau. “Today, QA is capturing and centralising interactions across every incoming channel, including voice, email, SMS, and social media. While a dedicated team continues to conduct targeted manual reviews, the platform now utilises automated spotlights to perform auto-QA on every other interaction moving through the system.
The implementation of native AI auditing tools fundamentally transformed this cost-heavy structure. Today, the system performs an automated QA sweep across 100% of interactions, regardless of the channel. Managers can utilise side-by-side spot reviews and deep-dive analytics to evaluate total operational performance instantaneously.
This transition has introduced new operational questions regarding scorecard design. Management is currently evaluating whether it is equitable to judge automated bots and human agents using identical metrics. “If you’ve got low-value calls being dealt with by the AI bots, is it right for the scoring mechanism to be exactly the same as it is for a high-value call? When you look at the AI, you can see the questions being passed and resolved, but if you look at it purely from a scoring perspective, they are dealing with a completely different set of interactions.”
“Is a really complicated booking or event handled by a human the same as an AI bot resolving a member’s issue quickly but with far less involvement? If the bot scores 90% on a lower-value interaction and the human scores 70% on something highly complex, is using the same scorecard a fair judgment against the two? We’ve looked at that, but we’re not sure we’ve got that right just yet.”
Because AI bots successfully absorb rapid, near-instantaneous resolutions—such as password resets and basic digital product redemptions—the human queue is left with highly complex, nuanced travel bookings. As a result, the organisation is looking to adjust its evaluation structures to reflect the vastly different nature of these low-value versus high-value workflows.
Driving proactive engagement and future roadmaps
Beyond reactive ticket resolution, AI allows Our Vacation Centre to execute proactive customer strategies. By monitoring real-time user behaviour on their digital web assets, specific system triggers prompt automated assistance:
Friction reduction: If a user loiters on a technical page (such as a password reset screen) for an unusual length of time, a proactive pop-up offering immediate micro-assistance is triggered.
Contextual marketing: If a member spends time evaluating a highly specific promotional offer, such as a monthly cruise line discount, the system initiates a tailored chat interaction to drive engagement.
Duchateau comments, “we have different messaging that we put up on the website to meet different scenarios, and you can set various triggers to go off. For instance, if we see someone loitering around on a password reset page for a bit, we will automatically trigger a message to pop up asking if they need a hand, and we can specifically tailor that message down.”
“Conversely, we can do the same on some of our other content pages. If we have a specific monthly promotion running with a cruise line partner and we see someone browsing that particular page, we can launch a proactive message to engage them right then and there”, he adds.
Looking ahead to the next 6 to 12 months, the company’s focus will shift heavily toward internal operational enhancements. Our Vacation Centre plans to deploy real-time AI coaching to guide human agents through complex enterprise workflows—prompting them on necessary validation steps, regulatory compliance requirements, and secondary membership benefits during active calls.
Additionally, plans are underway to integrate the membership sales and outbound telemarketing teams into the same unified architecture. While using AI to autonomously manage outbound sales relationships remains a long-term trial prospect, the immediate focus remains absolute – building a resilient, data-driven foundation that treats customer experience wisdom not as a fragmented archive, but as an immediate, competitive asset.