For a company that helps millions of people make their dream holidays a reality, seamless travel CX is everything. A missed moment, a slow response, a minor frustration can ripple across an entire trip. The trouble is, disconnected systems and data are increasingly creating major CX hurdles, even for market leaders.
No one understands that better than TUI, one of the world’s largest travel groups.
“It feels a bit like a before and after,” said Kira Drabner, Group CX Manager at TUI. “Like the whole travel industry, we were hit quite hard by COVID and then went through quite a bit of a transformation.”
Fortunately, TUI took a moment of disruption in the travel industry and used it to redefine how they listen to, learn from, and act on customer insights. What began as a patchwork of more than fifteen systems evolved into a single, unified CX platform – a live nerve center that connects the entire organization around one shared view of the traveler.
This evolution mirrors the broader travel industry’s CX transformation, where data, automation, and the voice of the customer are redefining what excellent customer service entails.
Connected Data and The Evolving Customer Experience in Travel
When Kira Drabner joined TUI’s CX team almost ten years ago, she found herself staring at a puzzle that nearly every large travel brand can relate to: a fragmented view of the customer.
“When I started, our voice-of-customer setup was super scattered. Every market was capturing feedback differently: more than 15 different systems, all siloed,” she explains.
Customers were more than happy to give feedback, but TUI’s team struggled to create a complete picture.
Each system had its own metrics, timelines, and processes. In practice, this meant that customer data was stored in disconnected pockets throughout the business. “It took 2-3 weeks to actually get the data sets from everyone to begin with, so we were always one step behind. Nothing was proactive.”
For a sector where moments matter, that delay is a killer. In travel, you don’t get many second chances. “If a holiday doesn’t go right, you usually don’t get a second chance,” says Drabner. “The moment’s gone.”
This forced TUI to step back and rebuild its entire travel customer feedback system from the ground up. The team wanted one trusted source of information that everyone could use: a single point of truth guiding quicker decisions, smoother service, and smarter ways to respond to travelers in real time.
Great Customer Experience in Travel Starts with Clarity
“When things restarted after COVID, the decision was made that none of the old systems would come back,” says Drabner. “From that day onwards, it was Qualtrics or nothing.”
That decision to rebuild from scratch became the cornerstone of TUI’s digital transformation. Rather than piecing together outdated systems, TUI consolidated its entire CX stack around one unified CX platform that spans markets, brands, and teams.
TUI isn’t alone on this journey to improve listening and connect data.
Across the travel and hospitality space, brands are racing to streamline and simplify CX technology. Leading organizations are moving toward “platform convergence”, unifying customer touchpoints and analytics under one roof.
They’re connecting CDPs, CRMs, contact center tools, and journey orchestration platforms, so they can start reacting to travelers’ needs in real time, across every channel. Drabner and her team turned this philosophy into practice. By breaking down data silos and aligning global teams on one consistent framework, TUI fundamentally changed how it listens to travelers.
The Rise of the “Experience Enterprise” in TUI
For TUI, Qualtrics went beyond simply connecting data. It empowered employees. That’s important because the real secret to great customer experience in travel isn’t just collecting feedback; it’s getting everyone across the business to act on it.
“We had a massive growth in users of the platform, which for me is the most important number,” says Kira Drabner. “It’s not about fancy board reports but about making customer feedback available to employees.”
TUI used a connected data and CX strategy to launch the evolution into an actual “experience enterprise”. Instead of CX sitting in a corner office, the company made it part of everyone’s day job, from contact center agents to airport reps and destination teams. “It’s not just about head-office people, it’s for those in customer service centers, destinations, airports, hotels … the people actually working with customers,” Drabner explains.
With the unified CX platform in place, employees could now see in real time how travelers were feeling and act before small issues became big problems. Over 10,000 people across TUI’s global teams log in regularly to make better everyday decisions.
That cultural transformation separates reactive brands from proactive ones. When frontline staff are empowered with live data, satisfaction rises on both sides of the equation.
Research backs up this concept, showing that companies aligning employee and customer engagement outperform their peers by 147 percent in earnings per share. That’s the measurable business value of connecting EX and CX, something TUI is demonstrating at a global scale.
Instead of relying on quarterly reviews or survey summaries, feedback now flows continuously through the organization. The travel customer feedback system becomes a living, breathing part of the company, and an everyday compass for decision-making.
Real-Time Feedback and Frontline Empowerment
If TUI’s unified system brought structure, what truly brought it to life were the people using it every day. For Kira Drabner, one particular example stands out.
“My favorite example is our customer-service center in Cairo,” she said. “The agents each have two screens, one for their operations system and one with a Qualtrics dashboard that refreshes every 15 minutes … so they can always see how happy customers are with the service they’re providing.”
It’s a simple setup, but it captures everything the new travel customer feedback system is about: real-time visibility, transparency, and ownership. That kind of empowerment transforms travel customer service from reactive to responsive.
The company has focused on simplicity and alignment too, connecting insights to roles: “If we want to engage frontline staff, it needs to be easy and clear,” Drabner adds. “Let’s not overload it, maybe we have a hundred filters, but we only show the five most relevant ones.”
The future of customer experience in travel will be built on the same principle. Every touchpoint, every agent, and every destination team will have live visibility into the customer journey, powered by orchestration technology and a unified CX strategy.
Balancing Local Relevance and Global Efficiency
For a global organization, keeping customer experience consistent while staying sensitive to local differences is tough. Every market has its own culture, language, and expectations.
That challenge was especially true for TUI, which historically operated with substantial local autonomy. “In the past, the different markets operated very much on their own,” recalls Kira Drabner. “That’s one of the things that’s massively changed. Now our teams are structured in a group way.”
Unifying the voice of the customer travel industry across dozens of markets meant rethinking governance, workflows, and even mindset. “Our rule of thumb is: is it different for the customer? If it’s not, then we don’t make it different internally.”
Rather than imposing a single, rigid process across every market, the team focused on what really matters: offering seamless travel customer service that feels personal but remains consistent. “It’s always a balance between not making things more complex than they have to be, and making them relevant for the customer,” Drabner explains.
Of course, alignment at this scale doesn’t come without friction. “One big challenge was taking away the fear of losing control,” Drabner admits. “People were worried that if they handed over their systems, they’d lose flexibility. We had to show them it was the opposite, that one system actually gives them more insight and more power.”
It’s not just about performance either. In a global business like TUI, where data crosses borders daily, governance is also an ethical responsibility. By tackling both structure and trust, TUI built a unified CX platform that’s globally aligned but locally sensitive, a digital nervous system that supports both efficiency and empathy.
Unlocking the Power of AI for Customer Experience in Travel
Once TUI had its global unified CX platform in place and every market speaking the same data language, the next natural question emerged: what if the system could start thinking for itself?
“Now we’re starting the fun part, looking into how AI can help us power more things,” said Drabner. “We’re also looking at how AI can help us understand after a call or chat whether the customer was happy; sometimes you don’t even need to ask.”
That idea captures where feedback-led customer experience in travel is heading. Instead of relying only on post-trip surveys, TUI is exploring how artificial intelligence can interpret tone, language, and behavior to gauge satisfaction automatically. It’s about making feedback frictionless: the traveler doesn’t have to fill anything in, and the company still learns what matters.
Drabner adds, “AI can help us get more out of the open comments … we collect millions every year, and no one can read them all one by one.” With natural-language processing, that mountain of unstructured text becomes searchable insight. Patterns in sentiment can reveal emerging service issues days before they reach a complaints inbox.
Many brands are already using similar technology to anticipate needs and automate empathy – reading emotion, predicting next-best actions, and closing loops before a complaint ever lands.
Insights that once took weeks to surface now reach destination teams in hours. That immediacy can transform travel customer service, turning data into decisions while the traveler is still on holiday, not after they’ve gone home.
The ROI of an Aligned CX Strategy
For TUI, bringing fifteen fragmented systems into one wasn’t just about experience; it was about efficiency, accountability, and proving that a better customer experience in travel drives measurable value.
“Efficiency was a big part of the business case, handling one system instead of fifteen,” said Kira Drabner. “We’re well aware that the cost of new customers is much higher than the cost of returning customers.”
Bringing feedback operations together has made reporting faster, cut down on duplication, and saved thousands of staff hours each year. Yet the biggest advantage isn’t in efficiency. It’s in early detection, being able to spot potential problems before they become real issues for customers.
“Customer feedback often gives you a very early indication of something going wrong, before you see it in operational numbers,” Drabner explains.
That philosophy led TUI to develop what it calls the Customer Service Value Model. “It brings into numbers the cost of non-quality and the cost of acquiring new customers,” she says. In other words, it quantifies what happens when experiences fall short, and how much can be saved by fixing problems fast.
Across industries, brands that unify their CX systems report similar payoffs. Forrester’s Total Economic Impact report found that modern orchestration tools deliver 158% ROI within the first year, while Qualtrics users reported 25–30% faster time-to-insight.
For TUI, the logic is simple. When every part of the company works from one travel customer feedback system, teams react faster, customers feel heard sooner, and the cost of service drops across the board. As Drabner puts it, the investment pays for itself in loyalty, trust, and time.
“Efficiency is important,” she says, “but it’s the cultural change that really delivers value. Once everyone sees customer feedback as part of their job, you start to see the numbers follow.”
Unified Data & The Future for Customer Experience in Travel
For Kira Drabner, the future of customer experience in travel is about making collecting and acting on feedback feel effortless.
“We want surveying to no longer feel like surveying, but like conversations,” she says. “We tried adaptive follow-ups, and 85 percent of customers responded again. That was unexpected.”
TUI is moving into a new phase, weaving its travel customer feedback system directly into the journey itself. Feedback is turning into an easy, ongoing exchange that fits naturally into the traveler’s experience.
This shift from collecting answers to predicting needs is changing how the voice of the customer in the travel industry is understood. With the help of intelligent tools, teams can now sense when something isn’t right and step in to fix it before the traveler ever asks for help.
In the new era of travel customer service, every touchpoint, from mobile check-in to in-destination chat, becomes a feedback channel, powered by real-time orchestration and AI insight.
Inside TUI, the focus now is on getting “even more out of what we’re already collecting,” as Drabner puts it. The company’s data foundation means it can now experiment confidently with predictive models and emotion analytics, using AI not to replace human empathy but to scale it.
“We’ve done the hard work,” she says. “Now the exciting things can start.”
Making Customer Experience in Travel Data-Driven
TUI’s journey shows that transforming customer experience in travel means building a new mindset. The company’s decision to rebuild its entire travel customer feedback system was a crucial, business-wide movement.
After merging fifteen separate tools into one unified CX platform, TUI gave everyone across the organization the same clear view of each traveler. From call centers to beach resorts, teams can see what customers need and act immediately. That constant rhythm of listening, learning, and improving keeps the entire operation focused on delivering a better experience every day.
It’s a model of travel industry digital transformation in motion, combining AI, automation, and human empathy to deliver truly connected experiences. The payoff isn’t only efficiency or ROI (though those are significant); it’s the emotional trust that turns a first-time guest into a lifelong traveler.
For any travel brand looking ahead, TUI’s transformation offers a blueprint. Build from one source of truth. Empower your people. Listen continuously. Above all, treat feedback as the most powerful currency in modern travel customer service.
