Partnering with a travel BPO gives your brand trained agents, around-the-clock coverage and multilingual customer support for the weeks when bookings, changes and disruptions all spike at once.
For you, the holidays bring your highest-revenue trips. For your support team, they bring the longest queues of the year, often on the days with the least room for error.
Below, we cover what outsourced agents take on during peak travel season, what travelers need when plans fall apart, and when to put that support in place.
Illustration only. Every status change on the board turns into calls, chats and messages.
Travel BPO Support Covers Five Areas During Peak Travel Season
Outsourcing gives your brand extra capacity without hiring and training a seasonal team from scratch. During peak travel season, that capacity covers five main areas:
Booking changes and cancellations: Agents handle date changes, name corrections and cancellations, so your in-house team can focus on complex cases.
Disruption surges: When weather or delays hit, extra agents absorb the spike in rebooking requests within hours.
Overflow support: Calls and chats beyond your team’s capacity route to trained agents, keeping hold times under control.
24/7 coverage: Travelers stuck in an airport need help at 2 a.m., and round-the-clock agents make sure someone is present to answer their queries.
Multilingual queues: International travelers reach an agent who speaks their language.
With these five areas covered, your in-house team keeps the complex cases, while BPO agents absorb the volume that would otherwise fill your hold queue.
Alleviate the Pressure on Holiday Travel CX
Holiday travel now sets records almost every year, and support volume rises with it. AAA projected a record 81.8 million Americans would travel at least 50 miles over Thanksgiving 2025, 1.6 million more than the year before.
Air travel is climbing too. The TSA expected to screen more than 17.8 million people over Thanksgiving week 2025, and eight of the 10 busiest days in its history occurred in 2025 alone.
8 of the 10 busiest days in TSA history occurred in 2025
Sources: AAA Thanksgiving travel forecast 2025, TSA
A support team sized for an average week cannot keep up with that surge. Hold times grow on the trips travelers care about most, which lowers satisfaction and weakens travel customer experience at the busiest point of the year.
Rebook Disrupted Travelers Within Minutes
When disruptions occur, travelers need a new plan within minutes, on whichever channel they reach first. A single storm can push thousands of travelers to call, chat and message at the same time.
Flight cancellations have also become more frequent. U.S. Department of Transportation data shows airlines canceled 1.4% of flights in 2024, up from 1.3% in 2023. In December 2024 alone, that meant 4,579 canceled domestic flights.
Flight cancellations also create follow-on requests: refunds, hotel rebookings, car rental changes and travel credits. Each one needs an agent who knows your policies.
A travel call center that can add agents the same day protects both the traveler and your brand. A team that cannot scale leaves travelers on hold while their rebooking options sell out.
Offer Multilingual Customer Support to International Travelers
International travelers need support in their native language. CSA Research found that 76% of consumers prefer to buy when information is in their own language, and 40% will never buy from websites in other languages.
The same question arrives in many languages during peak season.
Source: CSA Research
Language gaps also create service problems. A traveler disputing a refund in a second language can easily misunderstand the answer and escalate.
Multilingual customer support reduces those misunderstandings, especially for rebookings, refunds and fees. It works best alongside coverage in a traveler’s local hours, so a question at breakfast in Madrid does not wait for business hours in Chicago.
Train Agents on Hotel and Travel Agency Systems
Hotels and travel agencies get the most from travel BPO support when agents already know their booking systems before peak season begins. A guest moving a reservation at 11 p.m. expects an answer on the spot, without a transfer to another team.
Each part of the industry brings its own pressure. Hospitality customer service teams field reservation changes, early check-in requests and billing questions, often from guests already on the road.
Online travel agencies manage trips that depend on several suppliers at once. One delayed flight can disrupt a hotel booking, a car rental and a connecting tour, and the traveler expects one agent to fix all of it.
Cruise lines face a surge of their own: AAA forecasts a record 21.7 million U.S. cruise passengers in 2026.
Agents who already know these systems resolve requests on the first contact. Travelers get one answer from one agent, with no transfers between teams.
Set Up Travel BPO Support Four to Six Weeks Before Thanksgiving
Travel BPO support works best when it is in place four to six weeks before Thanksgiving week. That window gives agents time to learn your booking platforms, policies and escalation paths before they handle live travelers.
Thanksgiving 2026 falls on November 26, so scope and volumes should be agreed in October. Training and a supervised trial period then fill early November, with agents ready before travel volume peaks.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a travel BPO?
Travel BPO is outsourced customer support and back-office work for travel and hospitality companies, covering bookings, changes, cancellations and disruptions.
What services does a travel BPO provide?
Travel BPO providers typically offer reservation support, booking changes, cancellations and refunds, rebooking during disruptions, 24/7 coverage and multilingual customer support across phone, email and chat.
When is peak travel season in the US?
The busiest holiday stretch runs from Thanksgiving week through New Year, and AAA ranks Thanksgiving as the single busiest holiday for travel. Summer is the other major peak.
Why do travel companies outsource customer support?
Travel demand swings sharply by season. Outsourcing lets travel companies add trained agents for peaks and disruptions without carrying a full-size team all year.
Keep Holiday Travelers Moving This Peak Season
Holiday travel brings record volume and little room for delay. When a flight is canceled or a booking goes wrong, travelers expect an answer in minutes, in their language, at any hour.
Centro is built for those surges. We provide offshore customer support across phone, email, live chat and social channels, with agents trained on your booking systems and policies before the holidays begin.
We work at boutique scale with enterprise discipline: big enough to staff your busiest travel days, small enough that the same team supports you every season. Businesses have relied on that model since 2009, across our five delivery countries.
Ready for the holiday rush? Talk to our team about peak season coverage for your travel brand.
Talk to our teamCentro is a BPO and customer experience outsourcing partner founded in 2009 in Virginia. Centro helps organizations worldwide scale customer service operations, omnichannel support and quality management, including through seasonal peaks.