Decolar's GenAI travel assistant SOFIA hits 1M monthly conversations, hybrid model outperforms AI-only by 2.5×

Latin American travel tech platform Decolar reports its in-house generative AI assistant, SOFIA, has reached 1 million monthly conversations across channels — growing at 35% month-over-month — with an additional 100,000+ conversations monthly on WhatsApp. Built on OpenAI's GPT-4 and Whisper models running on AWS, SOFIA handles 80% of support interactions without routing to a human agent. The company says 30% of all travelers now interact with the AI at some point between trip planning and post-travel support.

The most significant operational finding: a hybrid AI-plus-specialist model performs 2.5× better than AI in isolation. Top automated interactions are reservation status checks (35%), voucher downloads (28%), and cancellation policy queries (22%). On the voice side, SOFIA processes 2,500 calls per day and has cut human-agent transfers by 37%. The article — published as branded content in Valor Econômico — also notes that incoming CEO Gonzalo Estebarena (promoted from CTO, effective April) is positioning the assistant as a future 'personal concierge' that proactively joins WhatsApp groups and coordinates end-to-end itineraries.