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Spring break just wrapped up, and if you flew anywhere in the last few weeks, you already lived the story. If you didn't, here's the highlight reel. TSA checkpoints at some of the country's busiest airports were running with 40% of their staff calling out, passengers being told to show up five hours early, and lines that stretched so far people stopped even trying to estimate the wait. The reason, in case you missed it, is that the government stopped paying TSA officers. Unpaid workers called out. Shocking outcome, truly.
The situation has started to stabilize, but TSA officials have been pretty clear that the ripple effects—attrition, recruitment gaps, retraining—will be felt for months. And we are heading directly into the most expensive summer travel season on record, with domestic airfares up 15% year over year. Travelers are already irritated before they leave the house. They're going to show up to airports frazzled, overpaying for their tickets, and with exactly zero patience left for a bad customer experience on the other end.
So what does this mean for airlines and travel brands heading into summer? It means the margin for error on customer service is basically zero.
What nobody wants to say out loud
A disruption isn’t just a crisis. It’s one of the only moments in the airline relationship where the customer is paying attention to every detail, every signal.
Think about it. A smooth flight is invisible to you, and you likely don’t remember it. You showed up, you sat down, and you landed at your destination. The airline gets no credit for that because nobody thinks about it unless you’re served with loyalty points and miles from your preferred airline. But when the flight goes sideways—and flights will go sideways this summer—with one, two, three-hour delays, cancelled connections, will be followed by frantic calls to customer service while standing in a gate area that smells like a Cinnabon had a breakdown. Those are the flights that get remembered and acted on.
OAG found that 37% of travelers switched airline loyalty in the past specifically because of how a disruption was handled. Not because of the disruption itself. But because of how the airline responded to it. That distinction matters enormously. It means a bad weather event isn’t a threat to your customer base, but a test. And most airlines are still trying to solve it with the same old playbooks with a little bit of AI in the mix.
Customers are already there. The industry isn’t.
Consumers have adopted AI into their daily lives. They’re using AI to research destinations, compare flights, plan their itineraries, and make decisions. More than half of travelers now use AI tools to help plan trips, and the number of people using AI agents “extensively” jumped 124% in a single year. Nearly 70% say they’d want an AI agent to book and manage entire trips for them. And 62% say they’d choose an airline that offers proactive AI-powered service over one that doesn’t.
And yet only 35% of travel and hospitality brands are actually using AI to help their customers. (5) Customers are ahead of the industry by a wide margin, actively looking for this experience, and most airlines still have them waiting on hold or navigating a phone tree that was designed during the Obama administration.
The gap isn’t a technology problem. The technology exists and is proven regardless of vendor. It’s a sense-of-urgency problem.
And summer 2026, which arrives in a matter of weeks, is about to make that urgency very concrete.
What’s actually working now is agentic AI—a fundamentally different thing from legacy systems most airlines still have running. It connects to the real reservation system, checks live availability, makes actual changes, and knows when something is outside its lane and needs a human.
We saw what this looks like in practice during Winter Storm Fern this past January. One of our airline customers had ASAPP’s CXP handling dynamic rebooking across more than 3,800 disrupted passengers over five days. 40% resolved without a human agent even getting involved. Customer satisfaction held at 90% through the whole surge. One passenger who’d been handed a 13-hour LAX layover got rebooked in 8 minutes, rated it 5 out of 5, and said, “Multiple options and quick results.” During a storm. Thousands of passengers in the queue. Just eight minutes.
And that’s not even the whole list
Irregular operations are the highest-stakes use case, but they’re not the only one. Airlines field enormous contact center volume on an ordinary Tuesday, and most of it is exactly the kind of repeatable, predictable work that AI handles well and human agents find soul-crushing.
Flight status queries, voluntary flight changes, loyalty program questions, point balances (and how to redeem), lost baggage, and proactive delay notifications are pushed to a passenger before they even think to call. And yes, pet policies, which are genuinely complicated, vary by route and aircraft type, and a well-deployed AI handles them 3.5 times faster than a human with 26x fewer errors. That last stat is one of those numbers that sounds made up until you think about how many possible combinations of “My dog is 18 pounds; we’re flying to Costa Rica with a connection in Houston” a human agent has to reason through on the fly.
The point is that every one of those interactions, which can now be handled by agentic AI, is an agent freed up for the call that actually needs them. Not the “where’s my bag” call.
Summer isn’t a roadmap item
Every airline has AI on the roadmap. Pilot programs exist. Some deployments do too.
But summer 2026 starts in weeks. Fares are high, TSA is rebuilding, and something is going to go wrong. Weather, mechanical, traffic control—just pick your chaos. When it does, the airlines with the right systems in place will handle it and come out stronger. The ones that don’t will spend the summer on the wrong side of that 37%, one switched loyalty at a time.
The technology to turn a 13-hour layover nightmare into an 8-minute fix with a 5-star rating isn’t rhetorical. It’s deployed and running at major U.S. carriers today. The only question worth asking at this point is whether it’s in place before the next surge shows up.
