Airlines and travel brands need faster multichannel customer support – Here’s how BPO delivers it

• Airlines and travel brands manage some of the highest and most volatile support volumes in any industry, across phone, email, chat, social, and messaging apps simultaneously.
• Most in-house teams aren’t built to handle the sudden surges, language demands, and round-the-clock coverage that travel support requires.
• Outsourcing to a BPO with travel sector experience solves these gaps at a lower cost than expanding in-house.
• Afrishore BPO provides specialised multichannel customer support for airline and travel clients.

Few industries test a support operation the way travel does. A single flight disruption can generate thousands of contacts within an hour: via phone, chat, email, and social media, all at once, from customers who are frustrated and under time pressure.

Getting those interactions right matters. Getting them wrong is public.

Building enough in-house capacity to absorb those surges is expensive and hard to justify during quieter periods.

Travel brands need enough capacity to absorb disruptions, but they also need a cost structure they can sustain during normal operations. That tension is what makes outsourced multichannel support a practical decision rather than a cost-cutting one.

Why multichannel support is now a baseline expectation in travel

Customers don’t choose to contact travel brands through the channel the brand prefers. They use whichever is fastest at the moment: a chatbot at 3am, a phone call during a rebooking emergency, a social DM when every other option has failed.

Travel brands that only staff one or two of those options create friction at exactly the moments passengers are most frustrated.

Multichannel support isn’t a premium capability for airlines. It’s the minimum.

The gaps most airline support operations face

Here are some current challenges:

Volume spikes during disruptions

Schedule disruptions, cancellations, and weather delays create sudden surges no in-house team is fully staffed to absorb.

According to the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, nearly 1.7 million flights were delayed or cancelled across major carriers in 2024 alone. Each of those events generates a wave of customer contacts that arrive faster than static teams can handle.

These events are unpredictable by nature, which makes permanent staffing for them prohibitively expensive.

Channel fragmentation without unified response

When different teams handle phone, email, and social independently, without shared context or a single customer record, customers get inconsistent answers.

What the chat agent tells a passenger about their rebooking options shouldn’t differ from what the phone agent says. When channels aren’t integrated, it often does, and passengers notice.

Language demands at scale

Major airlines serve passengers across markets where English isn’t the primary language. Building genuine multilingual capability in-house requires ongoing investment in specialist staff who are underutilised outside peak periods.

BPO providers with multilingual capacity deliver that coverage at a fraction of the cost, without the permanent overhead.

24/7 operational requirements

Flights operate around the clock. Problems do too. A support operation that ends at 9pm leaves passengers without help overnight and creates a backlog that compounds until morning.

True 24/7 coverage built in-house requires three staffing shifts and significant management overhead.

What effective multichannel support looks like for airlines

Here’s what you should be aiming for:

Phone and live chat: Real-time resolution for urgent cases

Rebooking, cancellations, and high-emotion complaints need a real person with the system access to act immediately.

Agents should be empowered to process changes on the spot, not just apologise and escalate further. The measure of a well-run phone and chat operation is first-contact resolution rate, not just speed to answer.

Email and messaging app support

Lower-urgency queries – loyalty points, documentation requests, itinerary questions – suit asynchronous channels. Passengers don’t expect an immediate response, but they do expect one within hours, not days.

This tier is where workload management and SLA discipline matter most.

Social media response

Airline complaints hit record highs in 2024, rising nearly 9% year-on-year, and a significant share of that frustration plays out publicly on social media.

The standard for enterprise travel brands is a first response within 30 to 60 minutes during operating hours. There should also be a clear process for moving sensitive cases to a private channel before more information is shared publicly.

5 reasons travel brands outsource multichannel support

Why is working with a BPO a good idea?

1. 24/7 follow-the-sun coverage without permanent overnight staffing costs

Offshore support teams in different time zones provide overnight coverage as part of a standard operating model – not as an expensive add-on. South African delivery centres, for example, naturally cover European business hours and overlap with US East Coast mornings, making them a practical fit for airlines operating transatlantic and Africa-Europe routes.

2. Scalable capacity for disruption events and seasonal peaks

BPO providers can flex headcount to absorb surges without the airline carrying excess permanent capacity during normal operations.

3. Multilingual agents across the markets airlines serve

Coverage in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and other key travel markets without the overhead of building and maintaining that capability in-house. South Africa’s talent pool is particularly strong for French and Portuguese, which matters for airlines operating African and European route networks.

4. Faster resolution and measurable CSAT improvement

Dedicated multichannel support teams with clear SLAs and QA frameworks consistently outperform understaffed in-house operations on first-contact resolution and customer satisfaction scores.

5. Lower cost per interaction at scale

When volume is high and consistent, outsourced support costs less per interaction than equivalent in-house staffing. This is especially true once you account for recruitment, training, management, and attrition. South Africa offers a substantial cost advantage relative to US and UK in-house operations, while maintaining the English-language proficiency and low attrition rates that high-volume travel support requires.

How Afrishore BPO supports airlines and travel brands

Afrishore BPO is a Johannesburg-based BPO with 20 years of operation and a 750-seat delivery centre purpose-built for high-volume, high-stakes customer support environments.

Their travel support model is designed specifically for disruption scenarios – the sudden, simultaneous wave of contacts across phone, chat, email, and social that a cancellation or weather delay generates. Afrishore runs dedicated surge protocols and cross-trains agents to shift between channels as volumes move in real time, so queues don’t pile up behind a single channel while others sit idle.

For airlines and OTAs, Afrishore provides multichannel support coverage with the flexibility to scale during disruption events and peak travel periods, without the overhead of permanent headcount increases. Their South African delivery model bridges European business hours and US East Coast mornings naturally, making 24/7 coverage a structural feature of the programme rather than a costly add-on.

Afrishore holds ISO 27001, ISO 9001, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS certifications. Most travel support programmes are operational within 4–6 weeks of onboarding.

Talk to Afrishore about your travel support requirements.

FAQs

How quickly can a BPO provider set up multichannel support for an airline?

Timelines depend on the programme scope and the airline’s systems. A focused single-channel rollout can typically be operational within 4 to 8 weeks.

Broader multichannel programmes take longer to onboard well. Starting with a phased scope usually produces a faster, more stable launch than trying to go live across all channels at once.

How do BPO agents handle brand tone across different channels?

Through structured onboarding, brand voice documentation, and ongoing QA. Agents handling public social media receive different training and guidelines than those on phone, but the underlying brand standards should be consistent.

Regular call and interaction monitoring is what keeps tone calibrated over time.

Can outsourced agents handle sensitive rebooking and compensation cases?

Yes, with the right authority frameworks in place. Agents can be empowered to process rebooking options, apply compensation per airline policy, and escalate cases that fall outside standard parameters.

The key is defining decision authority clearly during implementation, rather than leaving agents to escalate everything.

What SLAs should airlines expect from a multichannel BPO provider?

Typical benchmarks: phone answer rate above 80% within 20 seconds, live chat first response under 30 seconds, email response within 4 hours, social first response within 60 minutes during operating hours. SLAs for disruption periods should be agreed separately, given the volume spike dynamics.

Key takeaways

• Airlines face unpredictable, high-volume support demands that in-house teams aren’t designed to absorb cost-effectively.
• Multichannel coverage, 24/7 availability, and multilingual agents are non-negotiable for enterprise travel brands operating across markets.
• BPO delivers these capabilities with more flexibility and at lower cost than scaling in-house.
• Afrishore BPO specialises in high-volume, human-led support for travel and airline clients.