The bottom line
Two questions decide this evaluation. Can the platform still answer when volume goes to ten times normal on a day nobody planned for, and can its self-service change a booking rather than describe one. Both only get tested on your worst day.
The constraints
What makes this sector's contact center different
Irregular operations set your worst day
A weather system closes a hub, a sailing is canceled, a strike is announced at 6am. Volume in those hours does not rise twenty percent. It multiplies, across every channel, from passengers already at the airport. Handle time rises with it, because rebooking takes longer than a routine call. Two curves move against you at once, which is why sizing to an annual average is the mistake.
The answer is never inside the contact center
The booking sits in a passenger service system, a central reservation system, a property management system or a GDS, often two or three at once for a group that grew by acquisition. Loyalty balances and fare rules sit somewhere else again. So the value of the platform is what it reads from and writes back to those systems, and what the agent sees when the call connects.
Languages and time zones are structural
Sell in thirty markets and you take contacts in thirty markets, around the clock, from sites on more than one continent. Local inbound numbers everywhere you sell. Routing that reads language, market and loyalty tier together. Follow-the-sun handoff without losing context. Data residency that satisfies European guests.
Money, and the rules around it
Agents here take payment, issue refunds and reissue tickets, so PCI DSS obligations land on the platform and the recording estate. US Department of Transportation rules oblige carriers to refund automatically when a flight is canceled or significantly changed. EU air passenger rights govern compensation and rerouting, and GDPR governs the guest data moving through it. The contact center version is unglamorous: retention set per region, recording pause that removes card data, and exportable records that survive a disputed claim.
Requirements
What to require from a platform here
Each traces back to a constraint above. Our RFP template gives you the structure to drop them into.
The evidence
Who runs what in travel and hospitality
Organizations that the provider or the organization itself has publicly named, in a dated source, as running its contact center in travel and hospitality. Each name links to that source, and the figures are as published there.
Five9
Published work here is about automating routine booking traffic.
Wyndham Hotels & Resorts (2025). Guest and franchisee service. Five9 reports a 62 percent automation rate, 40,000 password resets automated monthly and abandonment under 1 percent.
Alaska Airlines (2025). Guest contact center moved off premises. Five9 reports automated routing that cut wait times during spikes, and a 99 percent remote-capable workforce.
The Ivy Collection (2025). UK restaurant reservations. Five9 reports 20 percent better conversion, 3 percent fewer no-shows, 50 percent lower attrition and a fifth of routine inquiries automated.
Webjet (2023). Online travel agency and bed bank. Five9's awards release records abandon rate falling from 17 to 7 percent and SLA attainment rising to 83 percent.
Zoom Contact Center
Each named deployment sits on an existing Zoom estate.
Major League Baseball (2026). Fan support with quality management and agent assist. Zoom reports 392 supervisor hours saved per week at peak and 50 percent more calls reviewed.
Topaz Services (2024). Outsourced 24/7 hotel reservations across 80-plus queues. Zoom reports dropped calls falling from roughly 5 percent a month to near zero.
ATPI (2025). Global travel and events management, named in Zoom's earnings disclosure as selecting Contact Center Elite alongside Zoom Phone.
Chelsea FC (2026). Named on Zoom's Q1 FY2027 earnings call adopting Contact Center Elite and Virtual Agent Chat.
Genesys Cloud
Published work here is large multi-site migration, with AI layered on afterwards.
Virgin Atlantic (2025). Around 550 concurrent agents across voice, email, social and messaging. Genesys reports 28 million dollars of three-year AI value, a 25 point CSAT rise and 40 percent lower attrition.
IHG Hotels & Resorts (2025). Genesys reports thousands of guest services agents and toll-free numbers migrated across eight global sites with no downtime.
Aeromexico (2023). Around 1,200 agents migrated in four months. Genesys reports NPS up 55 percent, speed of answer down from 289 seconds to 30, and 250,000 dollars saved.
8x8
Named deployments replace a legacy phone system and the contact center together.
Cape Air (2022). Regional US airline. 8x8 reports 90 percent fewer abandoned calls, a 95 percent cut in average hold time and 80 percent lower attrition.
Southampton Football Club (2024). On-premises telephony replaced in six to eight weeks. 8x8 reports about eight hours a week saved for IT.
Maple Hospitality Group (2023). Chicago restaurant group centralizing reservations and guest service across four restaurants.
NICE CXone
Published work here is the supervisory layer on a large agent estate.
Marriott International (2023). Over 6,500 agents across 20 engagement centers, 11 vendor solutions consolidated. NICE reports update cycles falling from months to weeks.
Carnival UK (2025). Cruise operator on CXone Mpower Copilot and Autopilot. NICE reports a 99 percent increase in assessed engagements.
Talkdesk
Named customers are managed travel operations built around disruption handling.
Gant Travel (2025). Corporate travel manager, 100 to 150 agents across three countries. Talkdesk reports 80 percent of calls answered within 60 seconds and NPS up 30 points.
Carey International (2025). Chauffeured ground transportation in over 1,000 cities, using automation and quality management to absorb surge events such as the Super Bowl.
RingCentral RingCX
Its leisure references are venue and box office guest lines.
The Escape Game (2026). Guest care on about 30,000 calls a month. RingCentral reports 50 percent cost savings, a 16 percent lift in answer rate and 7 percent more bookings.
San Diego Symphony (2026). Box office line with automated callbacks. RingCentral reports hold times cut 95 percent, from four hours to under ten minutes.
Webex Contact Center
Named deployments sit inside an existing Cisco estate, alongside Webex calling.
Yum! Brands (2026). Internal and franchise support across over 59,000 locations in 155 countries. Cisco reports better support visibility and reduced response times.
Dallas Cowboys (2024). Ticket, suite and fan lines, about 6,000 inbound calls a month with AI-assisted routing.
Amazon Connect
The travel build spans several geographies on a proprietary CRM.
Priceline (2025). Online travel agency. AWS reports every conversation transcribed and generative AI summaries cutting after-call work and handle time.
Dialpad
The travel deployment uses in-seat AI coaching.
ATG Travel Worldwide (2026). Travel support desk across US and European operations. Dialpad reports roughly 10 percent time savings for the US team and fewer abandoned calls.
Dates are the linked source's publication or last-modified date. Several vendor pages are undated, so treat them as approximate.
Cost
What it costs in this sector
International telephony decides a travel budget more often than the seat does. Inbound numbers in every market you sell in, the porting timeline behind them, and per-minute rates that differ by country are rarely on a first quote and are routinely the largest variable line on the invoice once they are. Get coverage, number availability and rates market by market before you compare seat prices at all. The seat bands themselves are the general ones on our CCaaS pricing guide, and few travel operations sit in the bottom one, because voice is still the disruption channel.
Three more things land on top.
Licensing shape is the structural saving, and travel's version of it is not retail's. A retailer knows the peak is November and can buy a block against it. Here the worst day is unannounced, so what you need is a floor you can hold all year plus a written mechanism for going up and back down at short notice, with the notice period and the floor on the order form. Concurrent licensing, contracted seat flex and usage pricing each do that, and our provider ranking sorts which vendors offer which. Ballpark your monthly total →
Shortlisting
How to build the shortlist
Start from our ranking of the best CCaaS providers in 2026, then apply the constraint that describes your operation. New to the category? Start here.
Large estate, heavy supervisory tooling. Global guest services across several sites and languages is the shape Genesys Cloud and NICE CXone both document across airlines, hotels and booking platforms. Genesys sells concurrent hours, which matters on a seasonal roster. NICE builds forecasting, scheduling and analytics natively and prices AI separately. See Genesys vs. NICE.
Automating routine booking traffic. Five9 documents self-service and virtual agent deployments across travel operators, and it leads our general ranking at 30 to 500 seats, with Talkdesk second. See Talkdesk vs. Five9 and Five9 vs. Genesys.
Single property, venue or small brand group. Replacing a phone system and a reservations line together is what 8x8 is built for. For budget certainty, RingCentral RingCX and Dialpad put AI in the seat rather than an add-on band. See Zoom vs. RingCX.
Spiky volume with developers on hand. Amazon Connect has no seat to waste in the off season, and every unit of consumption carries a published rate. It needs engineering. See Amazon Connect vs. Five9.
Constrained by an estate you own. A Cisco estate points at Webex Contact Center. A Zoom estate makes Zoom Contact Center an add-on decision rather than a platform one. An office on Teams Phone has the native Teams route for back-office queues.
Neighboring sectors worth reading. The same seasonal licensing argument, with order and returns queues instead of bookings, is in the retail contact center guide. If a destination marketing organization, transit authority or tourism office is the buyer, the procurement and language access requirements sit in the government contact center guide. Travel insurance and assistance lines are covered in the insurance contact center guide.
FAQ
Questions travel and hospitality buyers ask
What makes a travel contact center different from any other contact center?
Demand is not smooth and it is not yours to control. Weather, an outage or a canceled sailing can multiply volume in an hour, and every contact is a customer already stranded. The second difference is that the answer never lives in the contact center. It lives in the reservation system, which makes integration the decision.
How do you size a contact center for irregular operations?
Size the platform for peak concurrency and the staffing plan separately. Ask for the concurrent licensing option, the burst limit on inbound trunks, the ceiling on simultaneous digital sessions, and what happens when self-service containment drops. Then load test before signing.
Which contact center platform is best for airlines and hotels?
There is no single answer, because the sector spans a 40 seat resort desk and a 6,000 seat global guest services estate. Large multi-site migrations with heavy workforce tooling land on Genesys Cloud and NICE CXone. Automation of routine booking traffic recurs on Five9. Venue and box office lines show up on RingCX, 8x8 and Zoom.
What is the largest variable cost in a travel contact center?
International telephony, more often than the seats. Inbound numbers in every selling market and the minutes behind them rarely appear on a first quote, and they can move more money than any rate discount you negotiate. Workforce management follows, a module almost everywhere rather than an option, then metered self-service, which bills most on the days volume peaks. Get coverage and per-minute rates market by market before you compare seat prices.
Can self-service really handle rebooking during a disruption?
Only if it can write back to the reservation system. A bot that quotes the policy and then queues the caller has added a step, not removed a contact. The test is whether the flow can change a booking or reissue a ticket unaided, inside fare rules. Ask to see it run against a test reservation.
How do we handle card payments taken over the phone?
Keep the card number out of the contact center. The standard approach pauses recording while the caller keys the card into the payment provider, so neither audio nor screen capture holds cardholder data. Confirm the pause and resume is automatic rather than agent-triggered, and get the PCI DSS attestation during the evaluation.