SriLankan Airlines Enables In-Chat Flight Booking with LIA

The travel industry has reached a tipping point. While the world is more connected than ever, the digital journey for a passenger, especially in the airline sector, remains fragmented across legacy systems, complex pricing engines and impersonal interfaces.

At SriLankan Airlines, this challenge became an opportunity to reimagine how passengers search, explore and confirm their journeys online.

TravelBox AI and LIA AI are both designed to bridge this gap, independently or together, turning complex travel logistics into seamless, human-centric experiences. LIA operates as a standalone conversational AI platform, while TravelBox AI complements it as a broader travel management and commerce ecosystem when deployed together.

With SriLankan Airlines now enabling in-chat flight booking through LIA, a new chapter in airline conversational commerce begins.Today, we are thrilled to announce a milestone that redefines the landscape of conversational commerce in travel.

Built for the Modern Airline Enterprise

This development is specifically engineered for airlines seeking to reduce friction in their booking funnel, lower the load on contact centers and meet digital-native passengers exactly where they are: inside a conversational, interactive booking experience.

For SriLankan Airlines, this means passengers can now move from inquiry to ticket confirmation without ever leaving the chat interface, transforming the airline website into a fully interactive booking environment.

Whether deployed as a standalone airline conversational layer or alongside TravelBox AI, LIA enables airlines to unlock meaningful digital engagement without forcing passengers out of the conversation.

The Innovation: End-to-End Booking Powered by LIA AI Agents

For the first time in the industry, LIA enables fully end-to-end flight reservations directly within an airline chatbot, while seamlessly leveraging existing airline commerce and reservation systems behind the scenes.

At SriLankan Airlines, this capability allows travelers to search, compare and complete their flight bookings entirely within the LIA chat experience, without redirection to traditional booking flows.Rather than replacing Passenger Service Systems (PSS), GDS platforms or pricing engines, LIA AI acts as an intelligent conversational orchestration layer on top of them. It integrates directly with airline systems such as Amadeus Altéa and SabreSonic, transforming complex booking workflows into a natural, in-chat experience for passengers.This allows travelers to search, compare and complete bookings conversationally, without being pushed out to external booking pages, while airlines continue to retain their existing commercial, pricing and fulfillment infrastructure.

From Information to Action: Key Capabilities

In its initial phase, LIA served as a reliable assistant for flight statuses and schedules. Today, the platform has evolved to support deeper, intent-driven travel research and transactional journeys across the passenger lifecycle.

For SriLankan Airlines passengers, this evolution translates into a fully conversational booking journey, from the first query to confirmed ticket.

The upgraded LIA chatbot moves beyond simple information delivery to enable a frictionless, fully automated booking experience. It now acts as an intelligent research and fulfillment assistant, capable of understanding nuanced passenger intent and translating it into actionable booking outcomes. Key capabilities include:

• Intelligent Flight Research & Fare Discovery: Passengers can explore the best available flight options based on a wide range of criteria, including lowest fares, best round-trip combinations, shortest travel time, earliest departures, preferred airlines or optimal connections. All queries can be expressed naturally, with LIA performing the underlying research across airline systems in real time. On the SriLankan Airlines website, this means passengers can simply describe their travel needs conversationally and receive structured, real-time flight options instantly.
• Flexible Data Capture: Passengers can either complete structured booking forms directly within the chat or simply provide details in natural language. LIA seamlessly supports both interaction modes, adapting to how each traveler prefers to communicate.
• End-to-End Booking:  The entire flight reservation journey, from search and comparison through to confirmation is completed within the chat interface, without redirecting users to external booking pages.For SriLankan Airlines, this marks a shift from informational chatbot to transactional booking engine, embedded directly within the conversational layer.
• Ancillary Monetization: Passengers can select seats, add extra baggage, and include other ancillary services directly within the conversational flow, preserving context and momentum.
• Instant Fulfillment: Upon completion, reservation details are generated immediately and ticket delivery is triggered to the customer’s inbox, closing the loop from conversation to confirmation.

The Technical “Secret Sauce”: LIA’s Agentic Architecture & MCP Flight Agent

The true innovation lies under the hood.

LIA is delivered as a complete conversational AI product, an intelligent AI platform powered by a multi-agent architecture. Rather than relying on a single monolithic service, LIA manages a set of specialised AI agents, each responsible for a specific domain of the travel journey.

One of these specialised agents is the LIA Smart Flight Agent, purpose-built for airline booking operations. This flight agent is exposed externally as an MCP-enabled service, allowing its capabilities to be securely accessed by MCP-compatible platforms.

Through this approach, complex airline booking workflows, such as flight search, pricing, availability and reservation creation are abstracted into clean, standardised conversational tools. These tools can be utilized not only within the LIA chatbot itself but also across other MCP-compatible environments, including AI assistants, chat platforms and digital commerce applications.

Typically, integrating directly with airline Passenger Service Systems (PSS) like Amadeus Altéa requires navigating heavy NDC workflows or complex REST APIs. The LIA Smart Flight Agent shields consuming systems from this complexity, translating underlying airline system interactions into simple, conversational actions—while still fully leveraging the airline’s existing reservation and pricing infrastructure.

For SriLankan Airlines, this ensures that the conversational booking layer enhances — rather than disrupts — the airline’s existing commercial and operational systems.Why this matters for airlines and digital product teams:

• Any MCP-compatible system can integrate SriLankan Airlines’ booking flow rapidly, without having to navigate Amadeus PSS or NDC complexities.
• MCP-enabled chatbots, applications and AI agents can access these airline reservation tools natively.
• Integration becomes faster, lighter and more scalable—without managing REST APIs or NDC schemas.
• SriLankan Airlines’ flight ticketing capability becomes instantly market-ready across any MCP-supported digital commerce platform.

Elevating the LIA & TravelBox AI Ecosystem

With the introduction of agent-driven booking capabilities and MCP-based airline integration, LIA evolves from a conversational assistant into a high-velocity transaction enabler while TravelBox AI continues to operate as a powerful orchestration and management layer where deployed.

We aren’t just managing data; we are building infrastructure for real-time revenue enablement.

At SriLankan Airlines, early production data validates this shift. Out of approximately 12,000 monthly chats handled by LIA, nearly 10% are flight search requests, clearly demonstrating strong passenger intent to research and transact via chat.

These interactions move beyond basic inquiries, capturing structured booking criteria conversationally and guiding passengers through the booking journey within the chat environment itself.

The introduction of fully end-to-end in-chat booking completes this journey, transforming conversational interest into confirmed ticketed revenue.

“Why navigate a website when you can simply have a conversation?”

Why This Solidifies LIA & TravelBox AI as Industry Leaders

By bridging complex airline PSS logic with conversational AI through an MCP-enabled, agent-based architecture, CodeGen continues to set a new benchmark for travel technology.

With SriLankan Airlines enabling in-chat flight booking through LIA, conversational commerce in aviation moves from concept to live execution.

Whether deployed independently or together, LIA and TravelBox AI provide airlines and travel businesses with unmatched agility, integration speed and revenue potential.

We don’t just follow industry trends—we build the infrastructure that defines them.

Discover what’s Possible → sales@codegen.co.uk