About Gulce

Gulce Karsli is CEO of Oojo (ojo.com), the online travel brand within Traveluro Group — a portfolio of call-to-book, high-touch travel companies operating for roughly 20 years. Unlike typical OTAs born fully digital, Oojo inherits concierge-grade service culture from its parent group while competing as a flight price aggregator with real-time inventory and strong NPS scores.

What we talked about

High touch at low price — How Oojo combines cheap-flight positioning with two decades of perfected call-center excellence — and why they avoid extreme low-cost fares that break service economics.

AI behind agents, not in front — Gulce's bottom-up bet: empower human support with AI trained on company data before exposing any customer-facing bot they cannot vouch for 100%.

The squeeze that never ends — Airlines at ~3.9% margins, Google and Meta channel concentration, price transparency, COVID, and geopolitical shocks — and why flight OTA executives are the industry's most resilient operators.

From flight seller to platform — Flights as customer acquisition; ancillary services, insurance packages, subscription membership, and app uptake as the real margin story.

Agentic search as existential threat — Vague AI queries ("somewhere warm for four days") break legacy search infrastructure — caching and throttling trade accuracy for cost.

Platformization as survival — Financial products, service bundles, and cross-airline loyalty as differentiated value AI agents cannot get directly from airline.com.

Sharpest moments

On empowered support:

We really empower our support agents to actually perform a lot of the actions.

On shiny front-end AI:

I feel that's just quite empty.

On data infrastructure:

90 % of the data gets like very useful system to system data gets discarded

On intermediaries without value:

if you do not have an added value, you will disappear.

On AI agent searches breaking systems:

I feel like going four days to somewhere warm somewhere in summer.

Key takeaways

• Oojo's edge is high-touch service inherited from call-center heritage inside a price-competitive OTA — not either/or.
• Customer-facing AI in travel is premature; empowering agents with backend automation is the current playbook.
• Marketing and payment costs dwarf operations on the P&L — yet most AI investment targets ops.
• Flight ticketing is becoming a loss-leader; platform subscription, ancillaries, and loyalty drive unit economics.
• Agentic AI threatens OTAs without unique packaged services, financial products, or cross-supplier loyalty.
• Legacy flight search architecture cannot handle fuzzy natural-language queries at scale — the industry has no fix yet.
• Organizational agility and transparent communication matter as much as tech bets in a turbulent geopolitical climate.