15below is thrilled to announce the acquisition of Airport AI, a high-performing startup that uses machine learning and natural language processing to automate two-way interactions between customers and airports. Hear from our leaders about what this deal means for them, our airline and airport customers, and the travel industry as a whole.

AI is everywhere. It’s shaping the way we manage everyday tasks, including searching, booking, and planning our journeys. But the operational side of the travel industry has been slow to adopt AI, often held back by legacy systems, siloed data, and the complexity of integrating new technologies into critical operations.

15below's CEO Nicholas Key, sat with Pierre Cuquemelle and Filipe Pereira, CEO and CTO at Airport AI, to answer ten questions to describe what this collaboration means for airlines, airports and their passengers, and how it will help deliver more efficient, personalised, and seamless journeys across the entire travel experience.

15below and Airport AI leaders answer 10 questions on the acquisition:

What does the collaboration between 15below and Airport AI mean for you and the aviation industry as a whole?

Nick: The collaboration between 15below and Airport AI is a monumental moment for the aviation industry. We’ve partnered with a small specialist business in the airport technology area with some very clever people working in the artificial intelligence area, and we love their products, we love their technology, and we can see so much opportunity to bring that to the airline sector.

Pierre: From an airport perspective, this acquisition is a unique opportunity to create more collaboration between airlines and airports. By bringing together 15below’s deep integration with airline operations and Airport AI's strength in AI-powered, passenger-facing digital interfaces, we can create more connected, end-to-end experiences for travellers.

What shared values or long-term goals made this acquisition a good fit?

Nick: Both 15below and Airport AI share values of collaboration and innovation driven by our customers, the airlines and the airports, always with the end-passenger in mind. These shared values have been key to each company's success in their respective markets. Bringing our two businesses together is going to allow us to build something even bigger and better in the future, delivering greater value to airlines, airports, and ultimately, passengers.

Pierre: I think both Airport AI and 15below share a strong belief in automation as an enabler of better human experiences, not a replacement for them. We are deeply aligned in our commitment to passenger-centric innovation, operational excellence, and building bridges between industry stakeholders. Most importantly, we both think long term. This isn't about short-term gains, it's about shaping the future of travel by improving transparency, resilience, and personalisation. 

What is the top industry challenge that you believe this partnership is uniquely placed to help solve?

Nick: The top industry challenge is the need for conversational messaging between an airline, an airport, and their shared passengers. Travellers today are bombarded with information on their phones and via so many different channels, and therefore the need for personalisation and two-way conversational messaging is greater than ever before. With Airport AI's technology and 15below’s communication platform, we'll be able to deliver this in a way no company, including 15below or Airport AI alone, has done before. So, it's a unique opportunity for us to deliver something truly valuable for the end passenger.

Pierre: I think the lack of coordination between airports and airlines when communicating with passengers is one of the biggest industry pain points at the moment. This partnership with 15below is uniquely positioned to fix that by aligning airline notifications with airport-level services such as retail offers, transportation information, and so on. It creates a seamless experience for passengers, and it no longer feels like they are being passed between disconnected systems. 

What will 15below + Airport AI mean for passengers day-to-day?

Nick: The biggest thing that airline passengers will see as a result of the collaboration is going to be the ability to have a digital conversation with their airline or their airport at any point in their journey. The combination of Airport AI’s and 15below’s technology is going to allow a passenger at any stage of their journey to make changes to their booking and to request different types of information from their airline, particularly in the areas of disruption and day-of-travel communications. It means airlines won’t need to guess what information their passengers need at any given time, because their customers can proactively ask questions and get reliable answers in real-time via whichever channels suits them in that moment.

Filipe: I believe that better coordination between the different stakeholders in the travel industry, in this case airports and airlines, will lead to an overall better travel experience for passengers. Passengers can expect more timely, relevant, and proactive updates. They can expect easier access to additional services like flight rebooking, check-in help, or lounge recommendations, as well as less confusion during disruptions since all stakeholders will be aligned in terms of communication. 

How soon can airlines, airports, and passengers expect to feel the benefits of 15below and Airport AI working together?

Filipe: The foundations are already in place. We have started some early collaborations. For airports using Airport AI today, they will quickly benefit from 15below’s robust infrastructure and worldwide support. Airlines and their passengers will start to feel the impact as soon as we launch some joint use cases. We expect some of these to come in the next few months, and we believe this will bring significant value during the first year of integration. 

What are you most excited to deliver together over the next 1-5 years?

Nick: We're most excited to deliver a joined-up traveller experience together. Combining Airport AI's technology with 15below's communications platform is going to allow us to offer a seamless traveller experience and to look after the passenger all the way through their journey. It's going to give airlines and airports an opportunity to use digital automation and artificial intelligence to support their passengers in a way we've never seen before, using personalisation, two-way conversational messaging, and other possibilities that the AI technology will present. We're going to deliver this traveller experience in a brand new way.

Filipe: We’ve always wanted to create a truly unified communication layer between airports, airlines, and their passengers, something that the industry has been lacking but hasn’t been able to achieve yet.

For the first one to two years, we’ll be aiming to deliver some shared use cases like coordinated passenger notifications, integrated disruption handling, and targeted service offers.

Over a longer period, we envision a platform where the entire passenger journey can be supported by real-time data and personalised digital assistance across all touchpoints.

Why was Airport AI the right partner to bring into the 15below ecosystem?

Nick: Airport AI is a unique business with some incredibly clever AI technology that is currently used exclusively in the airport industry. It is something that we've been wanting to bring to our airline customers for a number of years now so Airport AI’s technology - that the team has been improving for nearly a decade -  is going to allow us to develop highly valuable two-way conversational messaging for those airlines on behalf of their passengers.

But the acquisition of Airport AI’s business is also a really exciting opportunity for 15below to expand into the airport sector. We will now have a group business that works in both the airline and the airport sectors, and this combined approach is going to deliver the most extra value to the end passenger, who we can offer a seamless travel experience as they travel through the airport at the start and end of their journey.  

How does this move support 15below’s long-term vision for passenger experience and disruption management? 

Nick: 15below's long-term vision for passenger management and passenger engagement is focused on reducing the stress of travel and about engaging with passengers at every stage of their journey. This collaboration is going to give our airline and airport customers access to some really exciting new technology, enabling them to deliver a significantly higher level of service to their passengers.

This is very much in line with 15below's vision for the industry, which includes conversational messaging and a single communications hub on the 15below platform for all digital touchpoints with an airline's traveller, from the point of booking all the way through to when they complete their journey. This does inevitably include disruption, which is unavoidable, but when disruption events do happen, with this combined approach of 15below's communications platform plus the Airport AI conversational AI capability, it's going to be able to deliver a far, far better traveller experience for those impacted passengers. 

How do you see your technology evolving to suit airlines as well as airports?

Pierre: Our conversational AI framework was built with flexibility in mind, with a single objective of helping passengers in real time. While we did start with airports, the same principles apply to airlines. They deal with a high volume of passenger queries, complex operations, and have the need to offer quick, personalised responses. We can tackle these challenges by adapting our products and platform to the airline use case with some new features like check-in support, flight rebooking, refund management, and so on. With 15below’s expertise, we can connect seamlessly into airline systems and workflows and deliver this value in a much faster way.

What drew you to 15below, and why was now the right time to become part of something bigger?

Pierre: We’ve always believed that creating a better passenger experience requires closer alignment between all stakeholders in the industry. 15below brings decades of experience working with airlines and is deeply trusted in the space. Joining forces now means we can accelerate our vision, bringing airports and airlines into a shared ecosystem of smart, proactive passenger engagement.

On a separate but important note, we also felt very close cultural alignment between our teams, which made this partnership feel right from the start. 

We’re excited about this next chapter and look forward to what’s ahead. If you have any questions or would like to discuss this further, please feel free to get in touch with our team - [email protected].