Contiki, the original guided travel brand for 18-35s, deployed an AI travel expert on Contiki.com built with Kleio. Travellers can now describe what they are looking for in their own words and receive specific, bookable trips drawn from the live catalogue. Deployed in six weeks, the experience lifts sales conversion by around 10% and is the first step of a wider partnership with The Travel Corporation, across a portfolio of more than 40 brands.

The most AI-native travellers, served by the least AI-ready interface

Contiki's travellers are 18 to 35, the segment that moved fastest to conversational interfaces. They arrive expecting to ask a question and get an answer, not to operate a filter panel. Yet a guided tour is one of the hardest products in consumer commerce to express as a filter: it is a composite of route, pace, accommodation tier, group profile and season, and none of those reduces cleanly to a checkbox.

Multi-city itineraries carry more data than a filter can hold

A Contiki trip is not a single product. It is a sequence of cities, transfers, stays, included experiences and departure dates, each with its own constraints and availability. That density is precisely what rigid filters and keyword search discard. Historically the complexity was resolved by a human advisor, which caps how many travellers can be reached and how early in their decision.

Unification before conversation

Kleio's position is that solving this requires unifying the data before attempting the conversation. The Knowledge Engine consolidates fragmented product, pricing, availability, customer and document data into a hybrid architecture built for agent reasoning. On Contiki.com, the integration runs in real time on the product catalogue, so dates and availability are always up to date. That is what allows an agent to translate a vague ambition — a first big trip through Southeast Asia, with a young crowd, in the dry season — into named itineraries with real departure dates.

What was deployed, in six weeks

• A fully conversational search replacing the legacy search bar on Contiki.com.
• AI search across thousands of travel options, combining itineraries, departures and availability.
• Personalised product descriptions, generated from what the traveller has revealed in the conversation — pace, budget, group, the experiences they reacted to.
• Automated hand-off to a human, triggered by the traveller's intent.

Results

The AI travel expert runs as an A/B test on Contiki.com. Travellers exposed to the Kleio experience convert around 10% more often, turning more of the same traffic into bookings without additional acquisition spend.

“A multi-city guided tour is one of the hardest products in consumer commerce to express as a filter. The traveller arrives with a feeling, not a specification. What Contiki has deployed is not a search box with better language understanding, it is an engine that helps a traveller work out what they want and then puts a real trip in front of them,” says Adrien Mathieu, President at Kleio.

Next: agentic commerce and the TTC portfolio

The next step is to connect the Contiki AI expert directly to AI search engines and assistants, agent to agent, so that Contiki's live catalogue can be discovered and compared where travellers increasingly begin their research. The Contiki launch also opens a wider programme with The Travel Corporation, designed to extend across the group's brands rather than remain brand-specific.