Knocking the doors of travel agents or making numerous calls to get proper information regarding any trip used to be very tiring and time-consuming for travelers. For them, the entire process leads to a headache. However, such days are gone with the development of live chat agents and live chatbot for websites.
To meet the demands of the customers and to thrive in the competitive market, travel companies are now transforming themselves digitally. They are accepting artificial intelligence chatbots to expand their marketing opportunities and to improve the travel experience.
Stats and facts
The recent metrics on travel chatbots state that 82% of customer inquiries related to booking and reservations are handled by the bots. 30% of customers prefer to choose bots to make direct bookings. As a consequence, companies are experiencing a 79% hike in their travel revenue, which is indeed a great figure to cherish.
Won’t you love to incorporate virtual assistants into your travel website? Probably, this would be the best decision for your travel business.
5 Used cases of travel chatbots
Travel chatbots are disrupting the travel industry in various ways. They are simulating human conversation and at the same time, streamlining the customer’s journey. Even the bots when integrated with human resource management software ease out the manual efforts of the team and scale up their work efficiency. Let us focus on the applications of bots that have actually added a new dimension to the industry.
1. Booking and reservations: Travel chatbots are widely used to boost the reservation services offered by travel agencies. Booking and reservation are the critical part of any trip which has to be done in advance. With the help of travel website chatbots, travelers can easily make their bookings and reservations of flights and hotels in no time. No matter how busy you are, you can enjoy this one-tap booking experience a lot.
Chatbots as reservation agents have gained a lot of popularity as it has shown rapid growth in the business revenue. Apart from the travel agents, many airlines are using bot reservation facilities to reduce the work pressure and to enhance the booking service. Travelers love this personalized experience a lot.
2. Customer support: Whenever a business fails to acquire good customer support service, AI conversational chatbots come to its rescue. The chatbots are designed with natural language processing and machine learning technology that makes them efficient in understanding user intent. They understand the customer’s emotions, their requirements, and assist them with their concern.
From addressing customer troubles to tracking requests, artificial intelligence chatbots are utilized to automate the communication channel. Although bots are skilled enough to deliver accurate responses within seconds, there are certain situations where they fail to understand and fix the issue. In such cases, they escalate the ticket to the live chat agents so that no issue remains unsolved.
3. Run a survey: A good travel chatbot can be utilized to run a survey and gain multiple feedback and ratings from the customers. Collecting feedback and taking them into consideration is very important if you desperately want your business to survive.
With chatbots, you can organize a survey where you can ask your customers to share their experiences with the travel brand. The reviews can be either positive or negative. The positive ones give you more confidence to market your brand while the negative ones are required to learn about the wrong turns and make necessary improvements.
By teaming your AI bots with robotic process automation solutions, you can actually automate the feedback generation process and simplify the complex procedures. This will give you a better customer insight where you can learn about your customer behavior towards the brand and work on their priorities.
4. Manage expenses: Travel employees often find difficulty in managing the expenses and sharing the balance sheet with the employer. The AI-enabled chatbots give you the flexibility to upload the receipts and create a summary of the overall expenses.
The expenses include flight tickets, hotel room costs, and other travel expenses for a single trip. Many corporate agencies use these bots to keep a track of the corporate travel expenses and share the report with the travel managers or expense management team. A live chatbot for websites, social media, or other messaging platforms made it easier for the team to calculate and manage their budgets.
5. Train staff: Travel chatbots are even included in human resource management software to enhance the employee experience and increase the work efficiency of the team. With the use of bots, travel employees find it easier to educate themselves with advanced knowledge. Whenever they have any query, they immediately reach out to these bots and get their issues solved in no time.
Thanks to the FAQ-loaded chatbots that can deliver instant answers to any common queries. Their knowledge base always keeps on updating with the newest information related to the brand. This assists in the training and development of the team and building their efficiency level.
3 Things to consider while deploying travel chatbots
Not all chatbots act the same! You should understand that choosing any random bot to serve your travel business is not a good idea. Instead, you must consider a few things before deploying a travel bot to make the process more enjoyable and profitable.
- Watch out for the security corner: To ensure the travel business has a lower risk of data theft and vulnerabilities, you must include a chatbot that offers a high-security panel. The end-to-end conversation encryption, user authentication, self-destruction of confidential messages should be there in your bot.
- Make it more personalized: Chatbots are the replacement of human chat agents. Hence, they should be highly personalized with proper unique identity. The personalized messages, machine learning technology, and identity should reflect on their chats. The NLP feature adds a more personalized effect as it eliminates the language barrier.
- Train it with proper knowledge: Every chatbot has an intelligent knowledge base imposed on it. The knowledge base keeps on updating its information overtime to ensure that users get appropriate answers to their concerns. Therefore, the bots should possess the proper skill set and knowledge to respond to the challenges faced by the users on the other end.
Final words
Chatbots are the gamechanger for the travel industry. Agree or not? They have made the travel agencies acquire the highest competency level in terms of customer experience, workforce management, business revenue generation, and work efficiency. A live chatbot for website thus plays a pivotal role in this business and is expecting to gain more responses in the near future.
Guys, AI conversations are not just efficient when you are thinking to upgrade your travel business. You can team this with robotic process automation solutions to have a seamless experience.