Travel chatbots have given a superpower to the place travel and tourism industry. It’s one of the most ever-changing customer-facing global industries.
Gone are the times when travelers to plan a trip need to visit the travel agents to book flights or hotels. The demand for the travel industry is ever-growing in the market, and there is a dire need for the travel industry to ease travel for travelers.
People are more adaptive to digital technology and cater to the demands of travelers. The travel industry must adopt online opportunities to serve customers.
As per Expedia, travelers search for a minimum of 38 sites before going with a plan. They Google for the most affordable and agencies that provide reasonable prices with a good travel experience.
It could be a tiresome task for travelers to search and plan out of a plethora of options. Instead, the travel industry could use chatbots, a one-stop solution for travelers to get complete information, booking/canceling tickets, and many more.
Chatbots are mobile-friendly personal predictive and analytical capabilities.
The Most Prominent Use Cases for Travel Chatbots
Like other industries, the travel industry is also in parallel with adopting the emerging latest technologies to ease their overall process. Artificial intelligence is the most trending technology that helps almost all industries automate their complete business operations and reduce their costs.
Chatbots are not something that people don’t think of when we talk about AI. Like other technologies, the contribution of chatbots in the travel industry is uncredible; chatbots came with a list of use cases that helped the travel and other sectors overcome the various problems they are facing with the demand of the customers.
AI-powered travel chatbots can understand the emotions, context of chat, quickly provide answers, & assist them in resolving their queries. A conversational AI travel chatbot helps travel agencies up-sell or cross-sell their packages, book flights, tour packages, and many other packages.
Chatbots with AI capabilities can automate most of the process that improves customer satisfaction. Especially when people want to upgrade or cancel the bookings, chatbots can be of great help.
Also, chatbots available to customers 24/7 that helps the customers to get actively engaged with the bots in solving all their queries, send notifications and promotional messages.
Let’s Discuss Some of the Most Common Use Cases in the Travel Industry.
Hotels, Flights & Packages Search
Many travel agencies in the world have already started deploying chatbots and leveraging them. Reservation services are accessible for travelers to book flights, hotels, or any other packages using Facebook Messenger, Slack, or Skype.
Chatbots are more comfortable and easy to use for travelers to get a personalized customer experience than apps and websites. Chatbots come with various levels of capabilities such as live agents, solving predefined queries, analyzing the travelers’ intent using AI, solving level 1 or level 2 queries, and then shifting to human agents for complex queries.
The reservation process in chatbots is also very friendly with the customer. Travel chatbots generally start with entering the start point and destination and planned dates; then, chatbot searches it from a list of sites for the best deal.
Also, provide suggestions based on various factors such as-cheapest flights, busiest flights, first flights, weekdays flights, or “inspire me options.”
Most of the travel agencies are using travel chatbots for purposes such as-
- Sell tickets
- Select seats
- Add extra luggage booking online
- Answers frequently asked questions
- Informs about luggage allowance
- Time of flights
- Room bookings
They direct it to websites or operate on Facebook messenger, WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, etc. It also provides complete information on the chat itself without visiting their websites and enables users to do transactions online. Of those WhatsApp Chabots are more convenient to the people. See an example below:
Chatbots even notify the travelers whenever there is a decrease in the ticket price or discounts, inform them about flight delays, lost luggage, or something that went wrong during traveling.
Improving Customer Experience
There are many things that customers hesitate to ask while booking to the executive publicly. Chatbots can help them ask questions, and chatbots can address the issues by considering priority and easier handling.
Chatbots can transfer the call or chat directly to the chatbots. Using chatbot’s chat history, travel agencies can understand the common problems people face and plan accordingly to resolve the future queries that are troubling the customers.
It also helps the travel agency prevent negative reviews on TripAdvisor or any other platforms where their image gets ruined quickly.
Conversational Booking Experience
Due to the chatbot’s NLP capabilities, it will be easy for developers to train chatbots to understand the various keywords better and deliver the right answer to the customers.
Chatbots can catch the keywords and provide the right solution to the customers. Consider an example- if a customer is looking for a flight, then it follows the customer to fulfill the other needs of the customer’s such as-
- Hotel booking,
- Suggest places to stay,
- Rental car service/bus service,
- The weather condition in that place
- And suggest the necessary precautions to take at that place and many more details.
All these suggestions chatbots provide to the users based on the details customers have provided, and the budget customers have.
It also notifies or reminds you of every update throughout your journey. Help you keep all your documents at one place and consider your dietary needs while suggesting a hotel. It also calculates the overall budget and provides a city guide.
Expense Management
It’s a very daunting task for travelers to collect the entire receipts of expenses in one place. Some chatbots even help the customers calculate their overall costs and summarize the tour right from the flight booking.
These chatbots are proven to be very beneficial, especially for the people who go on business trips, because they can easily submit it to the companies as spending proof of business plans. The best thing is, chatbots are available on various messaging and other platforms/channels.
A Guide to Customer
Depending on the customer’s interest, preference, details, and budget, chatbots suggest the local hotels, food stalls, car services, exciting things to watch, and others needed after reaching a destination.
Using this, customers no need to spend their valuable time searching for places on Google, social media, or any other sources.
Now let’s discuss here the Benefits of Travel Chatbots to both travelers and travel agencies:
Chatbots with AI bring automation power to the travel agencies in handling their customers. It breaks the communication bridge between travelers and travel agencies.
People are more dependent on the automated process, and deploying chatbots in their business has created a new path for the travel agencies to fulfill their customer demands and come with more exciting offers to the travelers.
Chatbots engage travelers with chatbots, but it also brings more sales and improves the overall income level of the travel industries.
Let’s discuss out here some of the most noticeable benefits of travel chatbots to the travel agencies:
Saves Time
Many queries are repetitive, and handling all those queries is somewhat irritating for the human agent in a single day.
Chatbots will not feel such; they can answer all the repetitive questions any number of times without getting disturbed.
It saves time for the customer executives and travel agents to focus on more complex questions than answering basic or repetitive queries.
Process Automation
Travel chatbot with artificial intelligence capabilities can automatically answer all the basic to high-level queries and leave only the complex questions to the human agent.
AI chatbots can understand the interest, preference, and behavior and suggest the offers, discounts, and much other important information that can trigger the travelers in booking tickets or similar actions.
Chatbots can unclog call centers and automatically manage things like routine booking changes.
Online Payments
Travelers can directly pay through chatbots using platforms like messenger or telegram without directing it to the website and repeating the payment details each time.
The credit card details that are already saved in the app’s system can be used to make purchases through a chatbot.
Thus, chatbots simplified the overall payment process and bypassed all the traditional ways to pay online.
Automatically Saves User History
Chatbots automatically save chat history, and whenever a user revisits the chat, they can continue from where they left the chat.
It saves time for both the travelers and travel agencies and helps them better understand the problems.
Even travelers can refer to the chat history for previous recommendations and have all important saves in a single conversation flow.
24/7 Customer Support
It’s an unimaginable situation for human agents to be available to customers all the time. Many cases need to be handled instantly that might be impossible for the human agent to take.
Consider, for example- when travelers are on the road, which needs to be resolved instantly. A chatbot is available to customers round the clock and provides all the information required to travelers anytime.
A chatbot can resolve the queries without human intervention and only transfer the complex questions to human agents. Travelers no need to get worried about the time zone.
Skipping App Development
The cost of developing apps is high, and most people won’t install your brand app. Because they already hold a list of apps on their smartphone.
Even if they download the app, they will uninstall it once the purpose of the app completes. On the other hand, Facebook Messenger is the most used app for most users, and along with messenger, it carries a chatbot. Chatbot maintenance is much easier than app developments.
What Must You Consider While Building Travel Chatbots?
The use cases and benefits which we mentioned are possibly not applicable for every travel agency. Every travel agency won’t provide the same type of service; some agencies are restricted to some services.
So if you’re taking any chatbots, building it in that way will not benefit you; it may lead you to loss. Also, travel chatbots’ benefits are different for different industries.
All travel agencies need to know the services and the abilities of the chatbots before deploying them in their business.
Let’s know here some of the points to consider before going with the chatbots:
Check for Security
Travelers need to share their passports and other documents with the travel agencies while booking flights.
So travelers don’t want to take any risk by sharing it with any chatbots without going through the security process it follows.
Generally, chatbots follow using third-parties such as Facebook messenger; in that case, requests are automatically authenticated that enable an app to send a user’s details to a parent platform.
Traveler/customer security plays a vital role; chatbots vendors can’t compromise on it.
Support AI With a Human
You must check for the capabilities of the chatbot before deploying it. Generally, chatbots with AI capabilities can answer all the queries and transfer the complex queries to the human agent. Always look for almost all tasks that must be clarified with the chatbot without getting transferred to the human.
Develop a Chatbot Persona
Your chatbot represents your brand and prepares your brand well with all the information about your product. There should not be any language barrier. Make available all information through chatbots so that users must not switch to google for searching any queries.
EndNote
Travel chatbots provided a new experience to both travelers and travel agencies. Chatbots and AI have entirely changed how customers are connecting with brands.
Top travel brands already deploy travel chatbots, and it’s a super success for them. But the thing to consider here is you must select the right chatbot which satisfies all your brand’s requirements.
You can try SmatBot for a 14-day free trial! You can understand how effective it is.
Our SmatBot team is always ready to help you in all possible ways.