SUMMARY

Flighter is an AI-native IROPS (Irregular Operations) platform that automates passenger accommodation when flights are delayed, cancelled, or diverted. Founded by an operator with four years of hands-on experience manually sourcing hotels for carriers, Flighter turns a chaotic, phone-and-spreadsheet workflow into an agentic system that detects disruptions, sources rooms, communicates with passengers, issues payment via restricted virtual cards, and generates EU261-compliant audit trails — end to end, with zero IT integration required from the airline.

PROBLEM

When a flight is delayed overnight, cancelled, or diverted, European airlines are legally required under EU261 Article 9 to accommodate every passenger — yet most carriers still manage this through call centres, WhatsApp groups, e-mail, and spreadsheets. A single mid-sized hub like Vueling Barcelona processes around 50,000 hotel rooms a year for disrupted passengers, with no-show rates reaching 20% — a €1–1.5M annual leak at just one airport. Operations teams spend hours per disruption phoning hotels, manually issuing vouchers, reconciling invoices, and assembling EU261 evidence after the fact. Passengers wait in queues at the gate without information. Hotels invoice incorrectly. Compliance documentation is incomplete when regulators audit. The result: airlines overspend on accommodation they don't use, underspend on care passengers actually receive, and carry latent legal exposure on every disruption. This is a billion-euro operational problem hidden inside airline cost-of-disruption budgets.

SOLUTION

Flighter operates as an agentic operations layer sitting between airlines, hotels, and passengers. When a disruption occurs, the airline uploads or pushes passenger details — no IT integration required. From that moment, the agent runs the full accommodation workflow autonomously. It assesses the disruption, geo-locates available rooms against passenger composition and group rules, and sends each passenger a personalised SMS with a curated set of nearby options. The passenger self-selects from their phone; the booking is only confirmed at acceptance, eliminating the no-show waste that currently inflates airline accommodation budgets by up to 20%. Payment is issued through a per-booking restricted virtual card (MCC-locked, single-use), with the hotel invoice raised directly to the airline as required by EU261 Article 9. Every step — manifest receipt, passenger contact, acceptance, booking, payment, check-in — is logged into a structured EU261 audit trail that is regulator-ready by design.

The impact is measurable across three dimensions. Operationally, a disruption that previously consumed four to six hours of agent time is resolved in minutes. Financially, eliminating no-shows alone recovers €1–1.5M per major hub annually, before counting reduced overtime, lower compensation claims, and faster invoice reconciliation. Reputationally, passengers receive accommodation information within minutes of disruption rather than queuing at the gate, materially lifting NPS during the moments when airlines are most exposed.