How Omio is building the future of conversational travel

Omio ⁠ (opens in a new window) is one of the world’s leading multimodal travel platforms, connecting millions of travelers with trains, buses, ferries and flights. The company works with more than 3,000 transportation providers across 47 countries. As travel becomes increasingly digital, Omio is reimagining how people discover and book journeys through conversational AI.

As consumer expectations shift toward conversational interfaces, Omio saw an opportunity to rethink how travel discovery works. Traditional travel planning often requires navigating multiple websites, comparing transportation modes, and piecing together itineraries across providers. Omio believed AI could create a fundamentally different experience—one where travelers simply describe where they want to go and receive personalized, bookable journeys in return.

As an early OpenAI customer and partner, Omio became one of the first travel companies to experiment with conversational travel experiences powered by real-time transportation data. At the same time, the company recognized that the same technology reshaping customer experiences could transform how work gets done internally.

For Omio, conversational travel is not simply a new feature. It represents a broader shift from search-based interfaces to AI-native customer experiences.

While Omio was building AI-powered experiences for travelers, it was also transforming how teams operate internally.

More recently, Omio expanded that vision with a dedicated ChatGPT experience built on OpenAI models and connected to its global transportation network. By grounding responses in verified travel data, the company is helping building towards a new category of conversational commerce where AI serves as the interface layer between customers and real-world transportation systems.

As Omio continues expanding its AI-native approach, the company is helping define what conversational commerce looks like in travel—combining OpenAI models with real-world transportation infrastructure to make travel planning faster, simpler, and more personalized.

The integration enabled travelers to ask natural-language questions such as “What’s the fastest route from Rome to Florence?” or “Should I take a train or flight from Paris to Barcelona?” Rather than relying on static information, the experience connected ChatGPT to live transportation inventory and pricing data, helping users discover real, bookable journeys through conversation.

We sat down with Tomas Vocetka, Omio’s CTO, to discuss the company’s vision for conversational travel, its journey toward becoming AI-native, and how OpenAI is helping accelerate innovation across both customer experiences and internal operations.

In 2023, Omio launched one of the earliest travel experiences available through ChatGPT, connecting OpenAI models directly to Omio’s transportation inventory and booking systems.

The company began by rolling out ChatGPT to employees across the organization, enabling teams to experiment, learn, and identify opportunities to improve their work. As adoption matured, Omio expanded into Codex, embedding it deeply into engineering workflows and increasingly extending it to non-technical functions.