Alaska Airlines: AI Flight Search Tool for Redeeming Loyalty Points

12.05.2024 - 13:49 / skift.com / Justin Dawes

Alaska Airlines is testing an AI-powered flight search tool meant to inspire travelers during the early stages of trip planning and help them redeem loyalty points.

The tool allows users to ask for suggested flight destinations based on general topics of interest, such as a whale-watching beach or a wine-tasting vacation. And – this is new – it allows users to search for flights that they can purchase with specific amounts of loyalty points. 

Several airlines have said they are working on similar AI tools, but few have released anything yet, especially one that accommodates questions about loyalty points. 

It’s an early step toward a long-term goal of helping travelers with more than just shopping for specific flights, according to Natalie Bowman, managing director of product and digital experiences for Alaska Airlines.

“A travel experience that focuses more on your end-to-end travel journey is where we want to go. For us, it’s really putting our loyalty program at the core of it because we have so many partners where you can earn miles or redeem miles,” Bowman said. “We think AI could be a huge enabler of a really cool experience there.”

The tool also incorporates the network for 30 airline partners that fly to destinations worldwide, which Alaska has been building over the past year. 

“There’s not great visibility to that yet, and so this is a huge opportunity to show people that … they could come to Alaska to book global travel,” Bowman said. “And I think to do that, we need to get this in the hands of more people that are not already naturally coming to Alaska Airlines, and so that will be a big opportunity for us to use this to lure in new audiences.” 

The airline released the tool in mid-April for 5% of website visitors. It will be available to all website visitors in June. 

Alaska provided Skift with a link to the tool’s webpage so that readers can try it out. 

One of Alaska’s engineers quickly designed the tool as a side project using software building tech from Microsoft and generative AI from OpenAI.

“What we realized is what he generated was delightfully simple,” Bowman said. “It was all we needed to have; it didn’t need a ton of complexity.”

The user can ask for flight suggestions based with a general prompt, such as, “Take my family to a beach with whales this summer.” It’s meant to respond with flight options for several destinations, and each result is paired with a short description about why it’s included.

Users can ask to view flights that they can purchase for a certain amount of points. The response includes how much the cost would be after spending the specified number of points.

“This is a pain point that we know our mileage plan members have,” Bowman said. “People spend a lot