True problems to be solved: Connecting flights management
This might be one of the most stressful issues for the travellers. Suppose, airline offers you a reasonably timed, yet short connection between the flights that well matches your plans. However, while at the airport, waiting for the first leg of your flight, you notice that plane is not yet there and the reasonable transfer time shrinks until it is clear that you won’t make it on time. Or even worse, the first leg gets rescheduled, but not the other parts, and the whole itinerary is now a mess.
Airlines’ approach to this issue is:
You take your first flight in the itinerary, and then we will figure out what to do.
Thus, pushing travellers to arrive to an unfamiliar environment, with a foreign language, and then try and rebook the flight and figure out possible options to spend overnight.
In other words it shifts a burden of managing this problem from the airline to the passenger. And the passenger might have to deal with rescheduling other parts of their journey at the same time. All this unneeded stress can trigger pre-existing health conditions or create new ones.
It is not a surprise that airline has all the information to solve the problem at hand. It knows everything to use in a good prediction model, from plane status and its flight schedule to airport performance, weather conditions and passengers’ itineraries. By putting AI efforts in the right direction it should be possible to rebuild new itineraries before passenger even gets worried about their late flight.