How a Montréal venture is rebundling travel.
Last year, global travel finally returned to pre-pandemic levels.
But at the Montréal headquarters of FlightHub, one of North America’s largest online travel agencies, Ramzi Rahbani, FlightHub’s VP of Products, Customer Platforms and Innovation, began to notice that travellers themselves were not the same.
FlightHub dramatically retooled its tech to capitalize on the growing desire for “rebundling.”
While the company had built an impressive brand, tech stack and services around offering customers easy access to affordable flights—facilitating more than 30 million travel connections since 2012—Rahbani said that FlightHub customers began to express frustrations that had nothing to do with price.
“Based on our research and customer feedback, many travellers were using multiple platforms to piece together their trips. It wasn’t uncommon for them to rely on four to six different services—one for flights, another for hotels, separate platforms for car rentals, insurance, and currency exchange,” he said. “Travel planning was getting more time-consuming and complicated, so seamlessness and personalization was key.”
To address that pain point, FlightHub dramatically retooled its tech and product offerings in 2024 to capitalize on the growing desire for “rebundling”, or connected trip management, in which consumers are looking for one-stop solutions rather than an app for everything.
Worn down by the need to subscribe to multiple streaming channels and operate their personal and professional lives through a variety of platforms, consumers are increasingly looking for comprehensive support and services, not dissimilar to those provided by brick and mortar travel agencies in pre-Internet times.
“By bringing these services into one platform, we aim to simplify the process and reduce the need for travellers to juggle multiple providers,” said Rahbani. “Industry research supports the notion that travellers can spend hours piecing together different elements of their trips across multiple platforms.”
FlightHub is a product of Momentum Ventures, a holding company based in Montréal committed to growing startups that make a significant impact in the travel industry. To do this, the company and its ventures have always tried to stay at the forefront of customer demand.
For years, FlightHub has closely monitored customer feedback, through both direct contacts and wider surveys.
“There was noticeable pattern in customer behaviour. For example, many customers who initially booked flights through us would return later to inquire about accommodations or car rentals. We also tracked an uptick in searches for related services on our platform,” said Rahbani.
Today, FlightHub customers can book a suite of services through a customer portal called My Trips, allowing them to coordinate every element of their travel from connecting an eSIM, renting baby gear, booking excursions, or exchanging money.
The company is looking into expanding these services to include offerings that support sustainability, such as carbon offset programs and eco-friendly travel choices, made possible through strategic partnerships and technology integrations.
Rahbani said the company has made significant upgrades to its technological infrastructure in order to achieve a more streamlined booking service.
“This involved enhancing our search algorithms to provide optimal itineraries, not only for flights, but for entire trips that include connections, transfers, and additional services,” he said. “We also introduced more robust data analytics tools that allow us to tailor recommendations to each customer’s unique preferences.”
Technology has also allowed FlightHub to address another major pain point of modern travel: customer service.
On any given day, the company deals with thousands of customer inquiries across multiple airlines and travel services. To achieve exceptional customer service, Rahbani said the company combines AI technology with direct access to real people, ensuring customers can easily speak with someone when needed, while alleviating agents from basic inquiries.
“AI supports our customer service operations by handling a significant portion of routine inquiries through chatbots and automated systems,” Rahbani explained. “Our approach is to use AI where it can add the most value—such as quickly resolving simple issues or automating business operations—and then ensure that our customers can easily transition to speaking with a real person when their needs go beyond what AI can handle.”
AI is also used on FlightHub’s platform to provide personalized travel recommendations to customers, assist in fraud detection, and support dynamic pricing.
The company’s driving vision is returning a sense of joy and adventure to travel, and helping its customers focus on experiences rather than transactions.
“What excites me most about the technology we’re using is its potential to fundamentally reshape how we approach travel across the entire industry,” Rahbani said. “The technology we deploy enables us to create a platform where the entire journey feels intelligently designed, from the initial search to the return home and then even after that, in the referral and reconsideration phase. The era of personalization and seamlessness is here, and we are definitely moving in that direction.”
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To book seamless travel experiences through innovative Canadian tech, visit flighthub.com.
Photos provided by Momentum Ventures on behalf of FlightHub.