Vikram Joshi runs operations at Kestrel Travel, a Delhi-based outbound travel company. When a traveller in rural Vietnam called Kestrel's Indian customer line one morning and AIVA answered in Vietnamese, Vikram had to sit down. Until then, he'd been quietly losing customers to language barriers for years.
A traveller in rural Vietnam called our Indian number, and AIVA answered in Vietnamese. I genuinely had to sit down. We'd been telling ourselves these calls didn't matter. They mattered.
The challenge
Travel is a business about reassurance. Something will always go wrong — a missed flight, a closed border, a stomach bug at midnight in Lisbon. The question isn't whether things break. It's whether the customer can find a human voice on the other end of a phone, fast.
Kestrel sells outbound holiday packages to roughly 320,000 Indian travellers a year. Their customers fly to Bali, Tashkent, Reykjavík, Buenos Aires. The customer support line — staffed by a team in Delhi — speaks Hindi, English, and a smattering of regional Indian languages. Which is fine, until your traveller is a Bengali grandmother who's never made an international call before, stranded at a Bangkok hotel, and the local concierge speaks neither Bengali nor Hindi well.
Vikram's team had been quietly mapping the gap for years. Roughly 14% of distress calls came in with significant language friction. Some of those calls just ended — the traveller hung up and tried to figure it out themselves. The team had treated this as “the cost of doing business globally.”
Support team covered 4 languages (Hindi, English, Bengali, Tamil). Customers travelled to 65+ destinations.
Estimated 14% of distress calls involved language friction. About 5% just ended unresolved.
Previous IVR was 3-language only and 6 levels deep — many customers gave up before reaching a human.
After-hours coverage required overnight rotation across 3 time zones — expensive and unsustainable.
The setup
Kestrel went enterprise from day one — they had specific compliance requirements (PCI for payment changes, GDPR for European travellers) and wanted dedicated regions in Mumbai, Frankfurt, and Virginia. The setup took five working days, with most of that being legal and security reviews rather than actual product configuration.
The fascinating part for Vikram was how they tested it. They had AIVA call real Kestrel travellers who had recently completed trips abroad — with their permission — and recreate the kinds of distress scenarios that had given the team trouble. A traveller who'd called from Vietnam in 2024 spent twenty minutes on the phone with AIVA in Vietnamese, role-playing different problems.
“She told me afterwards that AIVA was better than the local concierge had been,” Vikram remembers. “She said, ‘Your AI listens better than the actual humans I dealt with on that trip.’ That was the moment I knew this would work.”
They went live across all three channels — voice for distress calls, web for pre-trip questions, SMS for itinerary changes. Coverage went from 3 languages to 40 in a single deployment.
The outcomes
The metric I keep going back to isn't volume or cost. It's the 5% of distress calls that used to just end. Those were customers giving up because we couldn't understand them. They're gone now. Every traveller gets through.
— Vikram Joshi, Director of Operations, Kestrel Travel