SEPANG: AirAsia Group’s chatbot platform powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning is expected to contribute to the low cost carrier's ancillary revenue stream while improving its overall passengers’ travelling experiences.

The airline said AirAsia Virtual Allstar (AVA) will support the sales of ancillary products such as seat selection, baggage allowance and meal add-ons as well as travelling insurance.

AirAsia chief customer happiness officer Adam Geneave said AVA, which has been integrated in AirAsia’s website and mobile app, would enable the airline to offer additional travelling features for passengers.

“AVA provides hands-on experience to passengers, seven days per week, with immediate response to queries. Historically, passengers had to deal with Allstars (staff) to resolve issues pertaining to their flights,” he said at a media briefing here today.

Geneave said the chatbot was capable of handling up to 25,000 individual queries per second, 24 hours per day, allowing passengers to get immediate response from AirAsia.

“Previously, people had to wait to get their queries solved, but now they can rely on this chatbot for instant flight status or booking process,” he added.

Geneave said AVA is able to assist passengers in 11 languages such as Malay, English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Tagalog and Indonesia as well as Thai.

“We plan to add more convenient features like flight change, name amendment (flight booking), and will be integrated in WeChat application by the fourth-quarter this year,” he said.

With AVA, AirAsia will no longer has to deploy additional workforce to solve passengers’ queries.

It had reduced wait time (respond to customer’s queries) significantly and increased customer’s satisfaction by 90 per cent in the last 12 months, he said.

Having launched in December last year, Geneave said AirAsia group did not significantly spend to integrate the chatbot platform, citing that the returns outweighed the investment.

“AVA has supported our customer’s agents to contribute to the overall ancillary income by selling eight times more ancillary products compared with 12 months ago,” he said.

Last year, AirAsia group posted RM2.06 billion in ancillary revenue, driven by the sales of baggage, inflight food and beverages, seats selection, wifi, insurance and cargo.