Next time something goes wrong mid-break, you might get your best customer service from a robot. EasyJet holidays has revealed that travellers rate its AI chatbot higher than a phone call to a human — satisfaction scores for the bot came in eight percentage points above traditional phone support, the company told the Abta Travel Convention in Madeira earlier this month.

The numbers behind that claim are striking. The chatbot now resolves around 45 per cent of enquiries from customers already on holiday without any human involvement, while the company's overall cost of service dropped by 10 per cent even as holiday volumes grew 22 per cent. EasyJet holidays' chief operating officer Matt Callaghan framed it as a scaling problem: the business is growing fast, and AI lets it keep support quick and personal without hiring an army of phone agents.

So how does it work? The bot pulls in your booking details, airport transfer times and holiday specifics, so answers are tailored rather than generic. And it is not just for mundane things like booking confirmations — Callaghan said the system has been tested on genuinely tricky scenarios, including wildfires, where it can relay information based on live developments. When a situation calls for human judgement, the bot hands you over to a staff member by phone or online chat rather than leaving you stuck.

There is one catch: plenty of customers still ignore the bot and pick up the phone. EasyJet holidays has responded by making the chatbot easier to find, spelling out what it can handle, and improving the quality of its replies.

The company has also pushed AI beyond its own app. New easyJet plugins for ChatGPT let travellers search flights, package holidays and live flight statuses directly inside a ChatGPT conversation — connect the plugin on the ChatGPT site or app and you can plan without switching tabs. The move reflects how normal this has become: an easyJet-commissioned survey found 51 per cent of respondents have already used AI to plan a trip, with another 17 per cent considering it. Among AI users, ChatGPT was the most popular platform, used by 62 per cent.

For holidaymakers, the practical upshot is that if you book with easyJet holidays, the fastest route to an answer — a transfer time, a booking tweak, or updates during a disruption — is increasingly the chat window, not the call queue. Human help is still there when you need it, but the company is clearly nudging everyone towards the bot first. For anyone who already uses ChatGPT to sketch out trip ideas, being able to plug easyJet searches straight into that conversation is a small but genuine convenience.

First reported by The Independent Travel.