Travel management company Flight Centre Travel Group has increased its ownership stake in two existing investments within its Labs tech development initiative.
Under the Labs umbrella, Flight Centre has fully acquired Sam, a mobile chatbot travel assistant already being used by several of the company's clients. Flight Centre initially acquired a 25 percent stake in Sam in 2017, when it acquired a quarter of Paris-based 3Mundi. Flight Centre now is now the sole owner and licensor of the product.
In addition, Flight Centre has increased its investment in 30SecondsToFly and its Claire chatbot product. Under the deal, Flight Centre will have exclusive use of Claire in the large global TMC category for two years, and the product will be fully integrated into Sam to provide artificial intelligence-powered chat and booking capability. The investment will increase Flight Centre's stake in 30SecondsToFly to about 10 percent.
The Sam and Claire platforms initially integrated last year, and Flight Centre's increased ownership stake in both will enable fuller integration, the company said.