Chatbots occupy a niche when it comes to exploiting the possibilities of technological advancements in the travel industry. Like in finance or healthcare, chatbots in travel can only handle a certain number of tasks. As the next phase in developing personal travel assistants, bots can take on a wide range of tasks, depending on the area in which they are deployed.
Let’s look at the categories to explore the primary use cases for travel chatbots
Many reservation services already allow travelers to get flight and hotel recommendations and book them via Facebook Messenger, Slack, or Skype. These chatbots offer a better and more personalized customer experience than websites and apps and are often similar to a call to a human employee.
The popularity of travel chatbots as booking agents is overgrowing. Users are typically asked first to enter their origin and destination and the dates they want to travel, after which the bot can search hundreds of websites for the best deal. In addition, travelers can expect additional features, such as “route tips” from Skyscanner that show the cheapest or busiest day of the week for a trip, or the “Inspire me” option on Cheapflights.
Disruption and customer support agents In a world dominated by social media, it is difficult for suppliers to keep disruption processes secret and avoid negative word of mouth. Customers can now use a bot to request assistance instead of searching for a contact number or contacting employees who are not responsible for the issue. Customer support through chatbots allows users to privately raise their complaints, which AI can automatically prioritize and categorize to facilitate handling. In addition, travel companies can track issues and respond accordingly, which helps alleviate some of the stress their employees experience.
Travel chatbots can assist travelers with booking and trip planning, keeping all documents and tickets in one place, and sending updates and reminders. Travel chatbots can also be used for the transfer process.
The benefits of developing travel chatbots
Apart from opening a personal and intelligent communication channel between you and your customers and using one of the most critical modern technologies of the near future, there are many reasons to use chatbots for your travel business. Here they are.
A chatbot can answer time Savings/Process Automation Many inquiries that travel suppliers handle regularly. By delegating the easy-to-automate tasks to a bot, you can let your employees manage complicated inquiries that require human interaction. According to Juniper Research, chatbots will save e-commerce companies $8 million by 2022 by saving $0.70 per user interaction.
In addition, a good bot can take the burden off call centers and handle things like routine booking changes automatically. Digital Payments Such messaging platforms as Messenger and Telegram allow users to make payments directly in a chat without being redirected to a website and repeat payment information each time. Credit card information already stored in the app’s system can be used to make purchases through a bot. Thus, bots offer a simplified experience and replace traditional websites and apps for users who rarely use them.
24/7 Customer Service Human staff is not always available to provide timely customer service during vacations and other peak travel times. A chatbot is readily available 24/7 and can provide people with the information they need at any time.
Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, bots can now identify and solve urgent but straightforward problems without human involvement. Customers don’t feel abandoned, regardless of the time zone, and travel companies can save on call center staff.
Eighty-five percent of travelers book their travel activities via mobile. That being said, most people already rely on their smartphones to navigate, search for restaurants and make digital payments when traveling.
The number of applications do you have on your smartphone? Most likely, like most people, you only have apps that are directly related to your daily life. Since many people travel 1-5 times a year, your branded app is probably among the 26 percent of abandoned or deleted apps after initial use. Facebook Messenger, on the other hand, the globe’s leading texting application, will most likely be actively used for an extended period, along with the chatbots it contains.
What to consider when developing a travel chatbot?
Not all chatbots are successful like not all apps are. Rather than rushing to create a bot just for the sake of it, take heed of our recommendations to ensure your chatbot is both fun for your customers and profitable for you.
Step One: Ensure Security When using e-commerce platforms – which is often the case with travel companies – users need to ensure that their payment or passport information remains secure. With third-party platforms like Facebook Messenger, requests are automatically verified with authenticated tokens that allow an app to send users’ information to a higher-level platform.
Regardless of the platform you choose, security is also in your hands. Beyond simple user authentication, there are other ways to protect a customer’s data, including timeouts, Touch ID or Retina scans, end-to-end encryption of conversations, and self-destruction of sensitive messages. As travel technology consultants, we recommend that our clients start with security measures first.
Step Two: Choose a Capability Chatbots aren’t meant to replace your website entirely and therefore don’t need to fulfill every aspect of the customer experience. Therefore, you need a chatbot with sufficient capabilities to respond to the challenges your customers will most likely experience.
“At the beginning, your goal should be related to your target market. It would help if you started small and focused on giving your unique bot features. Start with a customer segment and analyze what questions or queries you receive most often from them. This will help you determine which type of chatbot is best suited for that segment. Personalize your bot differently from various other bots available in the market.
Step Three: Support the AI with a Human Currently, it’s common for chatbots to communicate with customers only through AI and refer them to a human operator if the bot has trouble finding a solution. However, remember that the ultimate goal in developing a chatbot is to delegate the tasks that can be automated, not for it to respond to individual queries. Also, make sure your customers understand that they are talking to a bot.
Letting a customer think that a bot is a human assistant will confuse user confusion and disappointment. A chatbot should know when to pass the task to a human. For example, Sabre’s text-based chatbot Ella helps travelers get information about flight changes, reservations, etc., and answer questions. If Ella can’t answer the question, she forwards the customer to a live agent.
Fourth step: Prepare a comprehensive experience People often turn to chatbots when they don’t have time or patience to sift through cluttered mobile sites. So make sure a user doesn’t have to Google every vital detail that a bot can provide on its own. For example, if you’re suggesting multiple hotel options, be sure to include each hotel’s rating and mention if there’s a cancellation fee.
Fifth step: Stay in touch. Please don’t abandon your users after you’ve helped them. Focus on the beginning and end of the conversation with a customer. Message them after their flight or hotel check-in, ask them to rate their satisfaction with their chosen service, or offer suggestions for local restaurants and events. Make sure your messages are hidden and caring. Intelligent chatbots encourage customers to come back and get into a loyalty loop, turning one-time users into lifelong customers.
Step Six: Eliminate the Language Barrier To offer a multilingual experience and significantly expand your audience, you should develop a chatbot that people can use regardless of their native language. There are two ways to do this. The simpler one would be to create a bot that does not include NLP and uses predefined questions and answers. Booking.com, for example, uses templates with pre-translated questions and answers that allow hotels to chat with clients in 42 languages.
Another technique is to design your bot to match different patterns and train a natural language processing model for the new language. Note that while the second method requires more time and effort, the possibilities of using NLP to understand and learn from a user’s intentions meet users’ expectations to converse with bots as generally as if they were speaking to a natural person.
Step seven: Bring additional value to the table. It would be best to justify the need to create a chatbot instead of a website or app. Use the unique capabilities of chatbots to extend your current services or offer an exclusive look at something customers are already using. For example, the Waylo Messenger bot allows travelers to track hotel prices across the city or region of their choice and book hotels at a price they expect to be the cheapest at the time of their visit.
Chatbots and the use of AI are changing the way customers engage with retailers and the way the world will communicate shortly. With significant digital disruption and the increasing need to adapt to customers’ digital needs, travel companies need to provide a superior customer experience. Chatbots can play a vital function in this.
Not only do bots provide instant answers throughout the journey, but they are also becoming more personal than human employees – almost like a trusted friend in your contact list.
Have you checked out our Booking and Travel Chatbot
it helps ensure your website is in tip-top shape? Check it out now here: EngagerBot
Read More: Why Any Banking or Finance Business Needs a Chatbot
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