Custom Chatbot for Travel Industry: Benefits, use cases and development guide

Boost engagement

As previously stated, travelers search several travel websites for the greatest trip. Simultaneously, if your online travel chatbot can present customers with relevant offers, your agency will become more desirable to your clients and your engagement rate will grow.

Reduce the amount of work you have to do and the amount of money you spend on operations

When a traveler is interested in a specific tour or hotel, they are more likely to ask a question to learn more. The bad news is that your customer service representatives spend at least two hours per day answering the same inquiries. The FAQ chatbot can answer simple queries for travelers, lowering the pressure on your workers and customer service expenditures by up to 30%.

Increase the number of sales

Long forms are an unpleasant and stressful experience for travelers who want to book a hotel, rent a car, or pay for their ticket as soon as possible. A Messenger travel chatbot could easily guide customers through the sales funnel and clinch a deal with fewer conversations thanks to the connected payment method. To do so, travelers must submit their credit card information into Facebook Messenger, which will be saved for future frictionless payments.

Built community

Aside from business logic such as built-in payment and booking, a chatbot could be a useful tool for fostering a community around your travel agency by allowing customers to share their travel experiences and ideas. To do so, collaborate with influencers and travel bloggers, upload their articles or videos on your blog and use a chatbot to recommend this material to tourists.

Attract new clients

Customer acquisition cost is an important metric in several businesses, including travel. By initiating a discussion, proactive travel chatbots reduce CAC and attract new clients. Anyone who makes a reservation on your website or leaves a comment on your Facebook page can receive a welcome message from a bot. Furthermore, based on keywords used by your clients, your chatbot can offer appropriate information.
In brief, chatbots can improve your consumers’ booking experience by delivering more relevant recommendations, while also improving your business metrics and lowering operational costs.

The most successful use cases for chatbots in travel agencies

Now, let’s look at some well-known travel chatbot use cases and the outcomes of such an integration.

Reservation agent

Travelers can book airline tickets, hotel reservations, vehicle rentals, cruises, and even holiday packages using this type of chatbot on their website or Facebook page. Travelers must give the bot information such as their destination, date, kind of accommodation, price range, and so on to receive suitable offers.

Personalized digital travel assistant

Natural language processing (NLP) allows travel chatbots to identify specific user requests, such as “exotic Japanese weekends,” and respond with hotel recommendations, transportation, and recommendations for area attractions. Without having to fill out lengthy surveys, travelers receive immediate and relevant recommendations. Furthermore, such chatbots assist tourists in locating the closest rental car provider and providing local weather forecasts while taking into account the traveler’s budget and even dietary requirements. Personalized travel assistants aid passengers at every stage of their journey and preserve all of their documentation and tickets in one location in this way.

Customer support manager

This travel chatbot use case streamlines customer service by providing check-in notifications, flight status updates, boarding passes, and even booking confirmation via the preferred channel.

Agent for two-way communication

This bot travel use case will be beneficial to your business if you manage a two-sided travel marketplace. This type of chatbot connects travelers with hotels to verify room availability and hunt up important information like check-in hours and parking reservations. Because of the chatbot’s two-sided nature, hotels can send notifications in response to user requests.

Local insider

Many tourists travel to another country in pursuit of a genuine experience. They want to eat, entertain, and live in the same way as the natives do. A local insider chatbot is the greatest option for providing guests with local suggestions on restaurants serving local food, festivals, and other activities. As a result, your customers will obtain useful information without having to spend hours searching for the most popular locations on social media.

Step 1: Determine the chatbot’s capabilities.

You must describe the purpose of your chatbot, as well as set goals and objectives, at this stage. Answer the following questions to discover the proper chatbot objectives:

What is the size of your company?

Do you require a chatbot to assist customers or to entertain them?

What business process do you want your chatbot to automate?

How many individuals are you expecting to use your chatbot?

Do you require your chatbot to connect to databases, CRM, or a content management system (CMS)?

Step 2: Select the type of chatbot you want to use.

It will be easy for you to choose the proper chatbot type from among the following after you have a clear understanding of your project’s goals:

Scripted or rule-based Chatbots are the most basic, as they converse with users using a decision tree. When talking with users, scripted bots recognize keywords and direct them in the right direction to fulfill their objectives, such as information about current best deals. The skillset of such chatbots is extremely limited. You can still utilize them for simple tasks like:

Customer service representatives that respond to consumers with pre-programmed responses

Customers are notified about special deals by bots that engage with them.

AI-Powered Chatbots are more advanced chatbots that use Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to understand human language. Unlike rule-based chatbots, AI-powered bots can respond to a user with non-predefined responses, and machine learning helps them learn from each interaction and remember the user’s preferences.

If you wish to develop, go with this form of chatbot:

Booking agents assist customers in purchasing or booking items.

Customers’ requirements are gathered by recommendation agents, who then provide relevant results.

Personal travel concierge who will assist consumers in not only finding hotels but also booking flights and providing local information.

A chatbot that compares the prices of hotel rooms and airline tickets.

The user can utilize an automated check-in chatbot to check-in for a flight or a hotel.

Step 3: Determine which chatbot channels to use.

Now is the time to think about where you can put your chatbot to work. The following are the most popular chatbot channels:

On your travel website, you can have a built-in chat feature.

Your travel app for mobile devices;

Channels for mobile carriers (SMS, USSD)

App for texting (Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Kik, Line, Viber)

You can construct an omnichannel chatbot if you want to utilize it on your website, Facebook Messenger, and Telegram.

Then, to ensure that your travel chatbot developers can readily integrate the channels you’ve chosen, determine if they have an open API. In this case, the most effective strategy is to start with the most popular channel among your users and progressively introduce a chatbot into others.

Step 4: Select the most appropriate platform

You’ll choose a platform to construct your future chatbot based on your chatbot’s kind and communication channel.

You can use one of the following platforms to create a scripted-based chatbot using if/then logic:

Conversations on Hubspot

Chatfuel

Messenger on Facebook

You can design a chatbot without employing chatbot developers because these platforms provide an intuitive drag-and-drop menu.

Consider hiring chatbot developers for initial bot setup and training if you want to establish a more advanced AI and ML bot that tackles challenging business tasks. Consider the following platforms for creating AI chatbots as a technological solution:

AWS

Wit.ai

Watson Assistant by IBM

Bot by Microsoft

Step 5: Create a minimum viable product (MVP) for a chatbot.

You’ll now need to hire chatbot developers to assist you in prioritizing the chatbot’s business activities and implementing the most critical functionality in the travel chatbot MVP.

A minimal viable product is referred to as an MVP. When a client wishes to test a theory without investing a lot of money, this strategy is utilized in software development.

Step 6: Add more capabilities to chatbots for the travel industry.

Your development team will now deploy the chatbot MVP. However, the process of creating a chatbot does not finish here. Why? Because you must extensively study how your chatbot interacts with your consumers at this stage. To do so, invite your customers to try out your chatbot and provide feedback. You can also inquire about what features you’ll need to add to your chatbot during the second stage of development. Consider that building a chatbot is an iterative process that involves acquiring data, reviewing it, and making adjustments to it.

Tourism Chatbots in the Future

Not only will chatbot development increase customer service and cost-effectiveness for hotels, but also for airlines and online travel agents. Technology has made a positive impact on our lives.

Chatbots enable travel businesses to deliver individualized responses to customers, resulting in higher customer satisfaction. To stay on top of this competitive environment, we’re seeing a significant movement from text-based to voice-enabled chatbots.

According to research, 47 percent of individuals use voice search capabilities on their mobile devices at least once a day. As a result, AI-powered chatbots will continue to boost client engagement to the best of their abilities.