The Age of the Smart Traveller is here
We live in the age of transformation. The digital wave has made its way in every aspect of human life. From retail, medical, logistics, healthcare to travel and hospitality, no industry today is unscathed by digital disruption. With the rising need to attain customer satisfaction and humanize experiences across all touchpoints, chatbots have become a buzzword. The travel industry today is one of the fastest growing and it relies on customer experience, digital disruptive technologies and conversation AI. Flight booking, online virtual travel agents, web check-in, holiday planning can now be accomplished by a smart Travel Chatbot. These chatbots not only make travel processes fast and smooth but they also optimize business operations and reduce costs.
Research indicates that 55% of Millennials are inclined to positively view businesses that use chatbots. Millennials have an estimated $200 billion in purchasing power.
According to the HubSpot research report, 71% of people use chatbots to solve their problem fast. As of now, the biggest place where we see AI in the hospitality sphere is the chatbots for customer service. Customer care takes a very significant place in the travel industry, and chatbots allow to provide full-fledged customer support 24/7.
Also Read: A Handy Guide on How to Drive Tourism with Chatbots |
Chatbots is your next best travel assistant, let’s see how
AI-powered chatbots have made its place in the travel industry. They have made life easy for travel companies to run their business and also made it easy and hassle-free for new age travelers to get what they want in no time.
Virtual Booking Agent
Chatbots now can book your flight, help you select your seat, preferred meal and scoop out the best fares from a huge array of travel sites. They also suggest you with travel tips, sightseeing tours at the destination and help you get local transport. You get all your reservation needs fulfilled with better-personalized experience and round the clock service.
Skyscanner a popular flight booking site reported over a million unique chatbot interactions. According to SITA, 14 percent of airlines already use chatbots. Their chatbot Finn, launched in August 2017, sells tickets, answers frequently asked questions, and informs about baggage allowance, time of flights, etc.
Also Read: 5 Ways AI-powered Chatbots Revolutionizing the Travel and Hospitality Sector |
Customer Support Agent
Leveraging the power of Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence, chatbots now act as human agents for customer support. They can listen to customer, grievances, queries on travel, resolve issues and respond personally to unique customer’s need through chat support. Gone are the days of IVR interactions and long waiting time for problem handling. Customers can also provide valuable feedback via the bot.
Online Travel Agency
Due to the natural language processing (NLP) capability, chatbots can understand or be trained to recognize unique queries such as “romantic beach getaway” or “Europe family vacation” to offer a complicated set of services, from transportation to places to stay and visit. A bot will understand the utterances and use them in the search without making a customer go through a long survey with limited reply options. Travel chatbots can assist travelers both with booking and trip budgeting, keeping all documents and tickets in one place, sending updates and reminders.
Local Tour Planner
Chatbots these days assist travelers to become their local guide. They can send reviews, recommendations, give advice on the best outdoor activity and sightseeing tours. Chatbots fetch local information from various local websites and help travelers get all the information at their fingertips. The chatbots are mostly omnichannel, so it’s easy for travelers to surf through Facebook and get information about their upcoming travel. Assist is one such bot gaining popularity day by day.
In the coming times
Also Read: What Makes a Chatbots Platform Truly Enterprise-class |
With the increasing usage of intelligent chatbots to respond to traveler inquiries, travel business companies can concentrate on other areas of opportunity such as mapping out plans to increase repeat business and gaining loyalty for future travels. They can reduce operational costs and increase their ROI by fully optimizing processes with the adoption of Chatbots. Kore.ai is one such bot platform that helps travel companies build customer bots that suited to meet every traveler’s need.
