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Ixigo Builds Travel App Entirely Around AI
Ixigo has introduced a new version of its travel application that is fully built with artificial intelligence, a significant change from earlier updates that added AI features to existing systems. The company sees this as a fundamental shift, creating the entire platform on an AI foundation to provide a smoother, more intuitive, and automated user experience.
Meet TARA: Your AI Travel Assistant
At the heart of this new app is TARA, ixigo's multimodal AI assistant. TARA can interact with users via voice, text, and touch commands in English, Hindi, and Hinglish. It handles complex travel questions, suggests personalized flights and hotels, and helps organize travel plans. This conversational style aims to make booking travel feel less like a transaction and more like getting advice from an expert.
'Trip Mode' Centralizes Your Travel Details
The updated app includes "Trip Mode," a central hub for all information after booking. This feature provides important details like boarding passes, gate and terminal numbers, baggage belt updates, and live travel alerts. It also offers proactive suggestions, such as calculating the best time to leave for the airport based on current traffic, to improve the experience before and during travel.
AI Agents Handle Travel Tasks Automatically
Ixigo has also implemented "agentic travel flows," where AI agents work independently behind the scenes to manage various travel tasks. For example, they can automatically send boarding passes via WhatsApp, notify users about flight changes or gate updates through digital wallets, manage refund requests, and coordinate hotel check-in details. This reduces the manual effort travelers need to put in.
The company states that the redesigned app provides hyper-personalization, adjusting dynamically based on a user's past travel habits, stated preferences, and current travel stage. Founders Rajnish Kumar and Aloke Bajpai believe the future of travel will be increasingly "agent-led," with AI proactively assisting travelers before, during, and after their trips. In FY25, ixigo's platforms, including ConfirmTkt and AbhiBus, served over 54 crore annual active users.