HAHNAIR
“ Why should we implicitly trust AI with something as personally important as holidays or travel?”
Benjamin Sibbald, Head of Payments
Hahnair
Looking to the future, Benjamin remains sceptical of AI’ s role in travel. With AI and agentic commerce already generating enormous buzz in tech circles, it can be easy to lose oneself in the hype. Benjamin, however, is taking a measured view.
Particular, accountability is a big challenge when it comes to AI. He cites IBM’ s principle that computers can never be held accountable and therefore should never make management decisions. Why then, he asks, should we implicitly trust AI with something as personally important as holidays or travel?“ If you turn up at a hotel that claimed it was a 5-star, but instead is a building site with a terrible breakfast and awful beds, who do you blame?” he asks.
Currently, Benjamin and his team remain focused on enabling travel agent partners to do their jobs as effectively as possible. Partnerships continue to be absolutely essential to everything Hahnair does, with airline partnerships, travel agent partnerships and payment provider partnerships all important. These partnerships create feedback loops that drive optimisation. They also drive a healthier industry.“ We’ re always looking at providing the right solutions at the right time, increasing the size of the entire pie, rather than taking a bigger slice,” Benjamin reflects.
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