It may have flown its last flight in 2002, but the Ansett Australia brand has never quite left our memories.
Constantine Frantzeskos is the founder of AI company Saleschef, an agentic AI content engine which turns raw product specs into sales and marketing collateral. He stumbled upon the Ansett trademark and realised that it was available to register.
He has relaunched Ansett as a company that can handle your online bookings. Powered completely by AI, he has aspirations to build Ansett into the ultimate digital travel agent.
Frantzeskos was a child of the 80s and the Ansett brand resonated with him, as it does so many of us.
It isn’t just the Ansett brand doing the heavy lifting on this project. He has revived the brand, but added an extra spin to it with the use of attention-getting (and more than a bit cheeky) online ads to drive interest.
Using his Saleschef platform, Frantzeskos creates Ansett Travel ads using three AI agents that scour the news, craft insights, and creates real-time headline ideas.
“It was that sort of very, very topical advertising that happens at the speed of content, at the speed of culture. The AI basically takes that and turns that into advertising that we can run almost immediately, like within about 20 minutes to half an hour, it can be in market,” he explained.
The Ansett brand IP was just sitting there
“I thought: What an interesting opportunity there to potentially build out a travel brand… reviving Ansett,” Frantzeskos told Mediaweek.
“The person from IP Australia, who’s meant to call you in with a very serious tone ended up saying: ‘Oh, my God, I shouldn’t be saying this, but I can’t believe you got Ansett. How cool is this?’ And I was like: ‘Yeah, it’s so cool” Frantzeskos said with a laugh.
Frantzeskos believes the IP was sitting there, not being used, for around five years.
Frantzeskos isn’t a stranger to working with travel brands. He has done work with Emirates, Saudi Tourism Authority, Visit Victoria, Dubai Tourism, and a number of other brands over the years. He worked on digital strategy, marketing strategy, and built digital platforms. Though that work he came to understand something really key:
“The power of brands in tourism as trusted sources of curation is really, really, really important,” Frantzeskos advised.
An AI travel concierge for the everyday Australian
Using the URL www.ansett.travel, Frantzeskos has delivered what he has termed an ‘AI travel concierge service’ based around bookings. He is the sole human working for the company. It is an online booking company, which uses Victorian startup company Travlr to facilitate the bookings for it.
“The business that can run with infinite scale using AI. And if there is one area where service is everything, it’s in travel and tourism. Imagine if you had a million staff bringing your tourism experience to life. Now, that’s clearly not possible with humans, but it is possible with AI. And so, really, my vision is that I want to imagine an AI that knows your school holidays calendar, watches airfare trends, knows the bands you like, the sports you’re interested in, and understands about what you’re interested in,” Frantzeskos said.
To do this, he is using hundreds of generative AI agents that will do everything from pricing holidays to offering customer support to creating and publishing advertising material to inventory optimisation, and more. His ambition is to give every person in Australia their own full time travel agent.
What isn’t lost on Frantzeskos is that he is using a legacy travel brand with retro appeal to push what is a cutting-edge travel service. Is it something that would alienate the core audience who would connect the brand, which is the older mums and dads (perhaps the grandpas and grandmas…) of Australia
“From a consumer perspective, we don’t want to lead with the idea that this is AI. I want people, when they experience Ansett, is to experience just the best possible service they could ever imagine. So that it’s so magically great that they don’t realise or they wouldn’t consider or they wouldn’t know that it’s AI doing all the work in the background.
“I want this to be the most human and most unbelievable service experience they’ll ever have delivered at prices that are so great ,because we haven’t necessarily had to put tens of thousands of staff on. We’re not going to go out there and in our ads say ‘Oh, by the way, this is an AI product’ or that they’re talking to a robot now, because that’s kind of self-indulgent. What I want to do is I want it to be such amazing service that people say: ‘This is a really, really brilliant travel offering’, Frantzeskos said.