Genesys Cloud CX for travel, hospitality and leisure contact centres

Travel demand is lumpy by nature. A storm, a strike or a systems outage can multiply calls in an hour, while a launch or a sale fills the lines on purpose. A contact centre built only for an average day leaves callers on hold exactly when they are most anxious, and agents facing queues they cannot clear.

Genesys Cloud CX runs in the cloud, so capacity is not tied to hardware on site. Callbacks let callers ask to have their call returned instead of waiting on hold, and Genesys Cloud routes a callback to the last agent who handled it when that agent is available. Messages held in data tables let your operations team change what callers hear, announce a disruption or close a line in minutes, without a change to the call flows. Messaging channels such as WhatsApp and web messaging give people a way to wait without holding a phone at all.

When flights are disrupted, what callers are owed depends on the rules that apply. In the UK, the Civil Aviation Authority explains that delay rights are set out in UK261, that airlines must look after passengers once a delay passes a threshold set by flight distance, and that passengers can choose not to travel and receive a refund once a delay is more than five hours.

In the United States, the Department of Transportation states that a consumer is entitled to a refund if the airline cancels a flight, regardless of the reason, or significantly changes it and the passenger declines the alternatives, and that such refunds must be issued automatically: within seven business days for credit card purchases. A contact centre that understands these rules can route disrupted passengers well, give agents the right information in their scripts, and use self-service for the simple cases so people with complex journeys reach someone sooner.

Airlines, hotels and resorts invest heavily in loyalty, and guests expect it to count when they call. Genesys Cloud CX data actions can look a caller up in your reservation, loyalty or CRM system by the number they call from, so top-tier members reach a VIP queue with tighter service targets, and the agent sees the booking before answering. Prioritised guest tables let supervisors give chosen guests or suites an advantage in the queue, and priority values can bias routing between queues without hard-coding a hierarchy.

For a major US resort and casino, we built routing on reservation and loyalty data for every call, VIP queues with duty-manager fallback, and controls the operation owns: emergency messages, a kill switch and guest priority, all in data tables. For a luxury international hotel group, we helped its own engineers let guests check availability, rates and reservations in web messaging and WhatsApp, joined to Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Taking deposits, balances and upgrades by phone puts the contact centre in scope for PCI DSS. The PCI Security Standards Council's guidance on telephone-based payments states that sensitive authentication data must not be stored after authorisation, even if encrypted, and that every possible effort must be made to eliminate it from the telephone environment. Call recordings are part of that environment.

Genesys states that Genesys Cloud is a Level 1 service provider under PCI DSS version 4.0, with the PCI setting enabled for your organisation. Secure flows prevent recording and agent access while a caller enters card details in the IVR, and Secure Pause stops recording when an agent takes payment. Where card entry happens with an agent on the line, a payments provider can remove the keypad tones before the audio reaches the contact centre. For a US resort and casino, we designed exactly that: the payments provider's SBCs sit between the carrier, the hotel PBX and Genesys Cloud, with failover that keeps calls flowing if the payments layer is unavailable.

Airlines and hotel groups serve guests worldwide, often from contact centres in several countries. Genesys Cloud's Global Media Fabric lets an organisation use any Genesys Cloud media region for real-time media to and from agents and carriers, so voice can stay close to the people speaking while the organisation itself runs in one core region. It applies to BYOC Cloud trunks, and organisations still using premises Edges can reach it through hybrid media.

For a major global airline, we made its Genesys Cloud CX organisation hybrid, linked 18 premises Edges to cloud media in five regions, and gave every cloud site all five carrier trunks in failover order, well ahead of Genesys's end of support for the Edge hardware.