Philippine Airlines (PAL) carries millions of passengers a year across a domestic and international network, and its contact center handles close to two million inbound calls annually. As PAL accelerated a broader digital transformation, VP and Head of Customer Experience Mac Munsayac set an ambitious goal: customer support that felt faster and more personal at a scale human staffing alone couldn’t reach.
A hotline that speaks the way customers actually speak
Most voice AI is built for a single language. PAL’s callers aren’t. They move fluidly between English, Tagalog, and Taglish, often within a single sentence, and expect a Manila hotline to keep up. PAL also wanted to retire its IVR entirely rather than bolt AI onto one node of it, so the agent had to take the call from hello and finish the job: retrieving bookings, checking flight status, answering the long tail of baggage and fare questions, and more. Only out-of-scope requests reach a human, routed to the right queue with the conversation summary attached.
PAL evaluated three voice AI vendors in a head-to-head production bake-off, scored on customer experience, technical capability, and containment.
Sierra, deployed with ibex
Working with ibex, its long-standing BPO partner, PAL launched a Sierra voice agent on three Philippine hotlines in April 2026. The agent understands English, Tagalog, and Taglish, uses a custom Filipino voice persona fine-tuned specifically for PAL, and connects to PAL’s booking and flight-status APIs to resolve real requests rather than read from a script. It answers from more than 1,400 knowledge sources and hands off cleanly to live agents with full conversation context when a caller needs a person.
Sierra won the evaluation handily, and PAL expanded immediately beyond the Philippines, routing all US traffic to the agent as well, adding roughly 70,000 calls a month.
4.7 out of 5, in three languages
PAL set a high bar - Sierra and ibex cleared it. The agent delivered 98%+ accuracy across more than 900 FAQ test scenarios and a perfect pass rate on functional UAT. Customer surveys since launch have more than held serve with at a steady 4.7 out of 5, on par with its best traditional human agent queues.
The sharper gains came after launch, from working the data together: when Sierra and PAL dug into where booking retrieval was failing, they found nearly a third of callers dropping at a single verification step, simplified the flow, and lifted retrieval success from 30% to 75%.
Rewriting one question in the loyalty transfer flow — callers were confusing two membership tiers — cut mis-routed calls by more than half, from 15.5% to 7.2%. Neither fix came off a roadmap. Both surfaced in production conversation data, which PAL, ibex, and Sierra review continuously and every call is an input into the next iteration. Within three months, PAL had grown the agent from three hotlines to four, folding in its US line.
Just as important to PAL was ownership. A team of PAL customer experience specialists, the same people who had managed the airline’s chat agent for a year, now coach the voice agent directly.
“ibex and Sierra have been top-performing partners for Philippine Airlines, and the deployment of AI voice agents is elevating our customer support to a new standard of quality and scale,” said Munsayac. “The results are strong, with scalable automation and natural interactions enhancing both efficiency and the overall customer experience.”
What’s next
Sierra, Ibex, and PAL are continuing to rapidly expand customer use cases. Rebooking and name-correction journeys are next, with a longer-term vision Munsayac describes as a persistent travel concierge, an agent with memory that can reach out proactively during disruptions and act on a traveler’s behalf.
