Chinese online travel platform Fliggy – the travel division of Alibaba Group – is leading the way as the first Chinese online travel player to adopt a multi-agent approach to building AI-powered products in order to prepare for the shift from ‘online travel agencies’ to ‘omni-intelligent travel agents’.

To deliver this vision for customers everywhere, Fliggy has consistently launched new AI-powered products throughout the year, in both consumer-facing and B2B scenarios — with all products powered by multiple collaborating AI agents.

This started back in April with the launch of its smart AI travel assistant ‘AskMe’. In this product, multiple specialized AI agents work together to provide users with highly personalized travel planning, delivering a seamless experience similar to having a team of professional travel consultants. In the following moths, AskMe has launched features including itinerary maps, heat-based maps highlighting popular hot spots, and most recently in September, photo-based audio AI guides.

Fliggy’s business travel arm, AliBtrip, has also unveiled an AI solution for business travel, which includes an employee travel agent for personalized planning and a corporate management agent to help streamline backend processes and ensure compliance.

Already the company is pleased to confirm that some European partners are integrating these products to attract and serve Chinese outbound tourists in innovative ways. By providing official interpretation materials including visuals, textual content for architectural sites, attractions and exhibitions, and tour transcripts as authoritative data for pre-training, Fliggy’s clients can deliver accurate and engaging AI-generated Chinese tour interpretation services.

At Fliggy we believe the future lies not with traditional online travel agencies (OTAs), but with omni-intelligent travel agents (OTAs) – these will be the new ‘OTAs’. Dr. Alex Chen, Chief Technology Officer at Fliggy

Fliggy has extended its AI applications across various functions, including supply chain operations, customer service, merchant tools, platform governance, product development, and destination marketing. As of late March this year, approximately 10 percent of the platform’s online customer inquiries are now managed by AI. Some tools have empowered merchants in streamlining product and store management. For instance, with Fliggy’s AI publishing tool, travel agencies can convert Word document itineraries into a publishable format within 60 seconds. This automation can enhance product listing efficiency, reducing turnaround by 3.5 times and enable seamless automatic inventory management within the Fliggy system.

Meanwhile on the consumer user interaction front, AskMe introduces an innovative approach where users can access multiple specialized assistants simultaneously —such as a flight search assistant, a hotel experience expert, a discount and promotion specialist, a local tour guide, and a budget manager, which lead to an exclusive caring sense where multiple roles cater specifically to the user’s needs. It effectively recreates the experience of having a dedicated travel team working together for each user. It also suggests that AI may finally break the long-standing trade-off among scale, cost, and personalisation in travel — often referred to as the ‘impossible triangle’.

In real-world situations, use cases are rarely simple — they often involve a mix of tasks and require flexibility. A multi-agent architecture allows us to take a user request, break it down into manageable parts, and orchestrate agents or tools with the right capabilities to handle different pieces.

The smart system can coordinate their work and adjust in real time as things change, which makes it much better equipped for unpredictable, complex scenarios that people face every day.

As travel supply and demand grow more unstructured and long-tailed, an AI-powered business model transformation represents a historic strategic opportunity for the industry. We’re committed to this journey with disciplined, science-driven optimism — and we’re in it for the long haul. Dr. Alex Chen, Chief Technology Officer at Fliggy