Simon Young, CTO at Serko, discusses the wide-ranging advantages of AI for the travel industry and how the company plans to use it to transform corporate travel into a personalised, effortless experience. He also explains how partnerships – such as the one with New Relic – support Serko in its 2030 strategy.
Serko, the global corporate travel technology company headquartered in New Zealand, powers enterprise travel management for some of the world’s largest organisations. The company is in a strong position to lead the industry in AI innovation, global business travel growth and evolving traveller expectations.
As it sets its sights on the future technology landscape, Serko has launched its strategic vision for 2030, positioning AI at the centre. However, before AI can be scaled responsibly, visibility into a business’ internal operations is absolutely critical.
Simon Young, CTO at Serko, discusses how the company’s observability practice unlocks data-led decision-making and builds long-term capability, serving as a core business driver for its next chapter.
How are you approaching the rapid evolution of AI and how is it already transforming the customer experience at Serko?
With the value of global business travel forecast to exceed US$2 trillion by 2029 and the evolution of AI in full swing, Serko has made deliberate investments in AI capabilities. In 2024, we focused on building the foundations and teams required, and committed investment to accelerate the platform’s evolution, with AI firmly in focus.
We predict a profound change in how people search for and book travel and how business travellers behave – increasingly shifting from manually managing bookings themselves to delegating intent to intelligent systems that can act on their behalf.
As this transition occurs, solutions that combine proprietary data, deep supplier connectivity and the ability to operate within corporate policy environments are expected to have an advantage. We’re introducing Serko.ai, our new multi-agent AI solution, which is designed to act on behalf of both travellers and companies, making decisions within individual preferences and corporate policies. The solution will simplify the end-to-end experience of booking and managing travel for work. Serko.ai is currently in closed beta with some key US customers.
AI strengthens Serko’s advantage and strong position in corporate travel. Not only does it let us facilitate deeper use by travellers, it also opens up opportunities for us to move beyond travel booking, scale our operations, improve margins and expand into new commercial models.
Can you outline Serko’s strategic vision for 2030 and the role AI will play in shaping that journey?
Serko’s 2030 strategy focuses on leveraging AI to transform corporate travel into a personalised, effortless experience. It builds on our founding promise of making business travel effortless, less stressful and supported by someone who is anticipating the traveller’s needs.
The vision hasn’t changed. Serko has the platform, the data and the relationships. Now with AI, we have the final, transformative technology that allows us to deliver the solution.
AI also increases our competitive advantage. The technology is deeply embedded in Serko’s proprietary data earned through millions of real booking interactions, built on deep domain expertise in the nuances of corporate travel and grounded in the trust of the travellers, travel managers and organisations who rely on us to get it right. This is extremely difficult to replicate.
Our vision to 2030 leverages these proven strengths to build a significant US footprint, continue the strong growth of our Booking.com for Business proposition and deepen our leading position in the Australasian market. AI is fundamental across all of that vision – not only in the experiences that we’ll provide our customers, but in how we build those products and operate our business.
How is Serko’s observability practice enabling more data-driven decision-making and supporting long-term capability building?
Underpinning Serko’s strategic vision to 2030 and beyond is a decisive observability strategy with long-standing partner, New Relic.
Serko’s observability practice is well established, allowing our engineers to quickly analyse system behaviour and take proactive measures to boost performance and reliability. It goes beyond monitoring, giving us the proactive ability to see what’s impacting customer flows through the system and to address it in advance. For example, our team is able to see something’s happening
that is impacting search and we can diagnose to see if it is an underlying infrastructure problem or something else. The total end-to-end visibility into each stage of our funnel helps us optimise performance and drive conversions.
The higher degree of insight into our systems also unlocks data-led decision-making and builds long-term capability. Observability and New Relic are central to advancing Serko’s AI-powered ambitions, providing the necessary reliability to deploy and scale complex, data-intensive AI features in a demanding new market.
What are the key pillars underpinning this strategy and how do they strengthen Serko’s position in an increasingly competitive market?
We have a wide range of systems that coordinate to ensure the business traveller gets the best possible experience before, during and after their trip. The addition of AI makes this surface area even larger and potentially more prone to unexpected outcomes. It’s therefore critical for us that we have world-class observability across all our systems – and we rely on New Relic to provide the necessary telemetry for us, so we can tie all our systems together.
There are four essential types of telemetry – Metrics, Events, Logs and Traces – that collectively provide deep visibility into the health and performance of complex software environments. For a corporate travel platform, leveraging this data is critical for maintaining a competitive edge. It allows engineering teams to monitor real-time booking flows, track complex interactions across global airline and hotel supplier APIs and proactively resolve friction points before a traveller’s itinerary is impacted.
Gaining this deep insight relies on these four observability pillars working in tandem. Metrics provide foundational, time-stamped data points to track high-level trends like search latency or overall booking conversions, while Events capture richer, parameter-driven actions to map specific traveller journeys, such as a completed booking or failed payment. Logs offer granular, step-by-step records of background tasks that the software executes, allowing engineers to search through deep system data to uncover the root cause of any performance issues. Finally, Traces maps the connectivity across all these operations, tracking a single user request as it travels from a mobile interface, through internal servers and out to third-party airline reservation systems, ensuring every interaction remains visible and seamless.
Partnerships have clearly been central to your growth – how have collaborations helped accelerate Serko’s global scaling ambitions?
Partners have played a critical role in Serko’s ambition to scale globally, most notably our partnership with Booking.com. The business has grown from 300,000 completed room nights in 2022 to 3.3 million in FY25.
Our strong momentum with Booking.com for Business sets out a clear pathway to scale through continued innovation and a focus on strengthening core experiences, starting with the journeys themselves. Booking.com for Business will continue to be a core growth engine. It will cover full- spectrum travel, operating as a complete multi-segment travel platform with intelligence at every step. The partnership of Serko’s deep experience in business travel with Booking.com’s world-leading travel ecosystem makes for a uniquely powerful proposition.
Similarly, Serko’s partnership with New Relic has created granular operational excellence to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks that impact the customer journey.
Looking ahead, how do you see technology helping the travel industry overcome emerging challenges and what developments do you expect in the coming months?
The key market shifts are bringing challenges but also providing opportunity. Cost and value expectations are shifting, labour-intensive processes are being automated and travel needs vary across companies, regardless of size.
Technology will allow booking tools to become better at understanding intent, why someone is travelling and get ahead of the traveller’s needs. They will tailor every choice to the traveller and the company’s preference. They will be agentic by design, with the ability to take action for the traveller or company.
