Solstice Travel sells flights, hotels, and packages to about 6 million travelers a year across the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain. Most of its bookings are flights, and most of those flights go where they should.
The ones that don't are the problem. A single named storm over the North Atlantic, a French air traffic control strike, or a runway closure at a hub can cancel hundreds of flights in an afternoon. Every one of those passengers has a booking with Solstice, and every one of them wants the same thing at the same time: a seat on the next flight out.
The challenge
Solstice's customer operations team is 210 agents across London and Lisbon. On a normal day they handle about 22,000 conversations, split across chat, email, WhatsApp, and phone. On a disruption day, that number can pass 90,000 before lunch.
Rebooking is not a simple job. An agent has to find the booking in Amadeus, check the airline's involuntary change policy, search for alternatives, confirm the fare class and fare difference, reissue the ticket, and send a new itinerary. A good agent does it in about 11 minutes. During disruption, with systems under load and customers upset, it takes longer.
The results were predictable:
- Phone hold times of 2 hours 40 minutes at the peak of Storm Ingrid in January 2025.
- One in four callers abandoned before reaching an agent, then tried again on another channel, doubling the queue.
- Missed rebooking windows. By the time an agent reached a traveler, the best alternative flights had often sold out, and Solstice paid for hotels and compensation it could have avoided.
Solstice had an IVR that told callers to check the website. The website told them to call.
"The traveler doesn't care whose fault the cancellation was. They care whether we got them on the 21:40 or left them in the terminal overnight." — Tom Achterberg, Director of Customer Operations
Why Pazau
Solstice evaluated three AI vendors in spring 2025. Two could answer questions about the disruption policy. Only Pazau could act on it.
Pazau Agent connects to Amadeus through Actions: get_booking, search_flights, rebook, issue_voucher, and send_itinerary. Each Action runs inside limits Solstice sets. Rebookings with a fare difference of $150 or less are approved automatically. Anything above that goes to a duty manager in Pazau Inbox with the options already laid out.
Two other things closed the deal. The first was Traces: every rebooking is logged with the policy the agent followed, the fares it saw, and the Action it took, which mattered to Solstice's airline partners and to its compliance team under UK261. The second was Pazau Voice, which let Solstice replace the IVR with an agent that could do the same rebooking on the phone.
The rollout
Solstice signed in May 2025 and set a hard deadline: live before the autumn storm season.
June: Actions and sandbox. Solstice's integration team connected the Amadeus Actions in a sandbox against a copy of the GDS test environment. Every Action got a spend limit and an idempotency key so a retried request could never double-book a seat.
July: Procedures. Ines Carvalho, who led Solstice's Lisbon disruption desk for six years, wrote the first Procedures in plain language:
- "Involuntary schedule change → Rebook" finds same-day or next-day alternatives on the same carrier or its partners, in the same cabin, and rebooks with the traveler's consent.
- "Cancellation → Refund or voucher" explains the options under the airline's policy and UK261, then processes the one the traveler chooses.
- "Missed connection" protects the onward segment and checks whether a hotel voucher applies.
- "Package disruption" rebooks the flight and moves the hotel check-in date through the hotel Action.
August: Simulation. Every Procedure ran against 3,000 conversations from Storm Ingrid. Simulation caught that the agent was offering partner-airline flights on fares that didn't permit them. Ines added one line to the Procedure, and the rerun passed.
September: Live. Pazau Agent went live on chat and WhatsApp on September 2, 2025, and on the phone lines two weeks later.
The results
The first real test came on the weekend of October 18, 2025, when Storm Bram cancelled more than 1,100 flights across UK and Irish airports.
- 41,200 travelers rebooked in 48 hours. Pazau Agent handled 78% of rebookings end-to-end, with no human handoff.
- Median time to rebook: 1 minute 52 seconds, compared with 11 minutes for a human agent on a normal day.
- No hold queue. Pazau Voice answered every call on the first ring. Callers who needed a person were warm-transferred with the booking, the options, and a summary already on the agent's screen.
- Hotel and compensation costs down 34% compared with Storm Ingrid, because travelers were rebooked before alternative seats sold out.
- CSAT of 4.6 out of 5 on disruption conversations, the highest Solstice has recorded on a disruption weekend.
The 210-person team didn't disappear during the storm. It spent the weekend on the cases that needed judgment: unaccompanied minors, travelers with medical needs, and groups traveling to weddings and funerals.
"Before, I spent a storm weekend staffing phones. This time I spent it on the fifty conversations where a person really mattered." — Ines Carvalho, Disruption Operations Lead
Pazau Insights scored every conversation. It also flagged a pattern nobody had spotted: travelers on one partner airline were being told their ticket was reissued before the airline confirmed it. Solstice added a confirmation check to the Procedure the same afternoon.
What's next
Solstice is extending Pazau Agent to proactive disruption. When an airline publishes a schedule change, the agent will contact affected travelers first, on their preferred channel, with a rebooking already held. The team is also adding rail and ferry Actions for multimodal packages in 2026.
Tom's goal for the next storm season is simple. "A traveler should find out about the cancellation and the new flight in the same message."