AI speeds up booking Hajj trips by 7 times

2023: 7-fold increase in Hajj travel bookings

The official hajj operator Muslim Tour has switched to Russian artificial intelligence technology to design trips to Mecca and Medina. The company implemented the Smart ID Engine. The decision 7 times accelerated the service of pilgrims at the time of peak demand. About this Smart Engines (Smart Endzhins).

Muslim Tour is the official tour operator of the Council of Muftis of Russia and the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of the Russian Federation, organizing the sending of Russian pilgrims to Muslim shrines in the cities of Mecca and Medina of Saudi Arabia. Since 1997, Muslim Tour has sent more than 60,000 people to the Hajj.

Muslim Tour requires an original or copy of a passport, a general civil passport of the Russian Federation, a certificate of vaccination against meningococcal infection, and a certificate of acceptance of Islam for non-ethnic Muslims. Women need to show a document confirming the degree of kinship with mahram. For spouses - the originals of the marriage certificate and the passport of the Russian Federation with the seal of the registry office, for sisters and daughters - the birth certificate. The ticket is purchased and paid online.

Muslim Tour in 2019 began using the Smart ID Engine program to automate the process of processing pilgrims' documents. The solution automatically extracts data the general civil and foreign passports of the Russian Federation and certifying documents of others. countries CIS The system reads data more than 2.4 thousand types of documents from 230 countries and jurisdictions in 102 languages. are not Data transferred to third parties and remain under the protection of Muslim Tour.

Before implementing Smart Engines, we tested several OCR systems. When using third-party solutions with photographs of documents from customers, even for the machine-readable passport area, recognition errors occurred and this was fraught with receiving fines in Saudi Arabia, equal to the cost of a whole ticket, "said Ali Ibragimov, CEO of Muslim Tour.

The high accuracy of the Smart ID Engine program allows you to process documents automatically, without the participation of an operator. The solution extracts all text data from almost any photos, scan images of passports, from files sent in compressed form through instant messengers, and instantly enters them into the company's information system, which significantly simplifies the work of the manager.

An important feature of the solution from Smart Engines is that the program allows you to receive a revised image of the document in the future. The extracted individuals are used for visa processing and badge printing, and a high-quality copy of the certification document will be required by a pilgrim in Saudi Arabia. The original documents of the authorities of this country are kept in a special office and returned only on the way back at the airport in accordance with the requirements for the control of pilgrims.

Muslim Tour plans to expand the possibilities of using the Smart ID Engine solution, said Ali Ibragimov. The company intends to use a handwriting recognition program from the registration page of the national passport. According to the latest requirements of the Hajj mission, pilgrims provide this data in the form of correctly rotated photographs of the document and manually typed data from them. For June 2023, this is done by the hands of managers and it just takes a lot of time and nerves, - explained Ali Ibragimov.