Holiday Extras

Holiday Extras(opens in a new window) is the European leader in travel extras, helping travelers find the best airport lounges, hotels, parking, and insurance. They’ve been around for over 40 years, but have stayed on the cutting edge of innovation in the travel industry. To keep ahead of the competition, they rolled out ChatGPT Enterprise to hundreds of employees to support innovation and creativity across the organization.

As the leading travel extras provider in Europe, Holiday Extras serves an international user base, which comes with a slew of challenges. Giving one example, Annette Reuther, Head of Growth (Europe), explained, “We have a single marketing team that’s responsible for many markets, which means we need marketing copy in many languages, from German to Italian to Polish.” Other areas of the business, like customer support, also face these challenges of scale.

An additional challenge has been data fluency. Holiday Extras has a data-driven culture and relies on dashboards and metrics frequently. But while many employees are comfortable writing SQL to do their own data analysis, those employees who are less technical or data-literate might struggle. And some parts of the organization—like design, which has traditionally been a more qualitative function—are looking to become more metrics-driven and rigorous to magnify their impact within the company.

ChatGPT Enterprise has fundamentally changed the capabilities of the Holiday Extras team, and every function has experienced their own superpowers with this technology.

Within a few short months of adoption, teams across the company have used ChatGPT to:

• Develop content in multiple languages: ChatGPT Enterprise plays a critical role in localizing copy across different locales, which was previously very time-intensive. “Tasks that would have taken weeks before only take hours now,” Reuther said. “ChatGPT Enterprise allows us to take on more ambitious goals since the team is more efficient.” By using ChatGPT to translate hundreds of strings into multiple languages, the team is able to take on far more exciting projects than before. “We’re very happy with the translation quality, which we’ve verified with native speakers at the company.” 

• Uplevel data fluency: James Smith, Data Tech Lead, shared that non-technical employees have found unique ways to use ChatGPT. “People who are less technical or data-literate are able to upload CSVs and identify trends, something they never could have done before. They’re able to contribute to the discussion in new ways.” And for those employees who are more familiar with SQL, using ChatGPT Enterprise has allowed them to write queries 80% faster.

• Drive engineering productivity: “Different types of engineers have found different uses for ChatGPT,” Smith said. “Junior engineers might use it as a thought partner to validate their approach, while more senior engineers use it for communication, especially in higher-stakes situations like presenting to the board.” 

• Bring more rigor to UI/UX design: “We’ve built a UX Scoring GPT to help us become more metrics-driven,” said Liam Thompson, Head of Innovation & Design at Holiday Extras. “The GPT captures research about UI/UX principles from authoritative sources, as well as my personal guidelines and recommendations. Not only can it provide a quantified score, but it can also point out specific issues on the page and provide actionable design feedback.”

• Provide a superior customer support experience: With 30% of customer service inquiries now being handled by an AI bot before getting to a human, customer support costs have dropped across the company. Simultaneously, NPS (customer satisfaction) scores have risen from 60% to 70%.

As Holiday Extras invests in bringing powerful AI abilities to their employees, they measured AI’s impact on the workforce. Here are the results:

• ChatGPT Enterprise has seen incredible adoption, with 95% of respondents saying they use it weekly

• 92% of employees saved over 2 hours per week in productivity gains

• ChatGPT Enterprise has sped up code debugging times by 75%, greatly improving engineering productivity.

• All of this has cumulatively resulted in over 500 hours saved per week across the company

• This represents an equivalent of $500k in annual savings

Employees are happier and more productive, and continue to find ways to use ChatGPT Enterprise to boost their productivity and creativity. 

Looking ahead, Holiday Extras has also made strides to get this powerful technology into the hands of their customers. They’ve already released Syd AI(opens in a new window), a bot that can help travelers better understand their travel insurance policies. As they strive to become the ultimate vacation planning experience, they’re now developing an AI-powered, ultra-personalized Holiday Extras super app using OpenAI’s API.