FCM Travel has announced a new AI-powered conversational booking feature that allows travellers to simply describe what they need and receive options shaped by their policy, profile, past trips, loyalty status and preferred routes, significantly cutting down booking time. The feature is part of ongoing enhancements to FCM Booking, the company’s proprietary booking platform, and reflects its continued global expansion aimed at delivering a smarter, more intuitive booking experience.
Conversational booking is powered by FCM’s existing intelligence layer, Sam, which builds a richer traveller profile in real time by synthesising intelligence from every interaction. Each recommendation comes with clear reasoning attached, showing why it aligns with company policy, matches a traveller’s usual routing patterns, reflects their loyalty program status, or follows established team travel behaviour—giving travellers greater confidence to book without second-guessing their choices.
Jessica Dunderdale, Global Head of Product at FCM Travel, said conversational booking only succeeds when travellers trust what they’re being shown, and that trust comes from context rather than convenience alone. She added that the goal is for every recommendation to explain itself, enabling travellers to act with confidence while helping travel managers see stronger adoption as a result.
The booking experience is also designed to travel with the user across platforms. Initially available in Microsoft Teams and Slack, Model Context Protocol (MCP) technology will extend FCM’s booking capabilities to everyday AI tools travellers already use, including ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, without requiring a separate app. For travel buyers, this is expected to translate into higher in-program booking rates and improved data capture, without requiring travellers to change their existing habits.
The same intelligence driving conversational booking also feeds into FCM’s reporting and proactive analytics, surfacing spend patterns, compliance issues and disruption risk as they emerge rather than after the fact. This is designed to sharpen the role of travel managers, allowing them to convert real-time insights into timely business decisions.
Booking represents just one moment in a longer travel journey, and FCM’s embedded intelligence is designed to keep its technology and service teams connected with travellers from the initial planning stage through duty of care and in-trip support. John Morhous, Chief Experience Officer at FCM Travel, said the company’s technology ecosystem was built not to replace the judgment of its consultants, but to remove routine tasks from their workload so they can focus on moments that genuinely require human expertise—combining the speed of technology with the depth of human experience.