Conversational AI-powered Chatbots For Travel And Hospitality

You probably first thought of Siri or Alexa when you first heard of the term “Chatbot”. However, chatbots aren’t just confined to your phone, they are also used in the travel and hospitality industry. If you run any sort of hotel, motel, or anything in the hospitality industry, you can use chatbot technology to make your business better. The travel industry is taking the help of service-oriented chatbot platforms, which are aided by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

AI-powered chatbots are one of the hottest trends in technology right now, but they are also one of the most misunderstood. Chatbots were once seen as a trend in technology and then became a novelty. However, in recent times, chatbots and conversational AI in general have come into their own, and there’s no turning back. AI-powered chatbots provide an easy and cost-effective alternative to the more expensive and complicated branch of customer support. The travel and hospitality sector is ripe for chatbot-based customer service. Be it tourism, travel, or hospitality, chatbots offer a better and easier way to interact with customers.

64% of travellers and 80% of business users expect travel companies to respond to them in real-time. Nearly 74% of people make bookings on the Internet, and 80% prefer planning a trip via chatbots since it gives them the opportunity to customise their requirements. 70% of travellers prefer to be notified via messaging. 

Looking at the various statistics, we can safely say that today’s travellers are more digitally savvy and aware of the plethora of options available online. Ease of booking and smooth processes drive the industry today. The travel industry, on the other hand, is also actively moving to messaging apps. Various airlines, online travel agencies (OTAs), and hotels are automating bookings on WhatsApp, Messenger, and WeChat platforms while deploying chat on their own digital platforms.

Conversational Solutions for Travel & Hospitality

Gupshup’s conversational messaging platform ensures you build world-class conversational AI-powered chatbots that help provide support 24×7 and give customers the help they need throughout their travel bookings.

So what do you get with the Gupshup solution?

Pre-built Conversational Solutions

For Marketing: 

• Collect contact information of travellers planning for trips to destinations
• Generate ample and solid leads
• Create remarketing campaigns for past customers and prospects
• Retain potential customers in your marketing funnel

For Commerce:

• Let customers book rooms, flights tickets and more over a conversational interface
• Ensure a smooth booking / payment process on their favorite messaging channels
• Allow customers to make payments with 1-click bill pay feature
• Allow check-ins and upgrades
• Allow guests to do web-check in to the hotel/flight, do upgradation of reservation
• Book add-ons such as meals, spa, airport pick up etc.

For Support: 

• Understand the unique requirements of each customer and give them tailored packages
• Implement consultative selling
• Provide 24*7  support and feedback
• Get trained AI models that handle FAQs with context changes
• Get chatbots that can pass advanced level queries to human agents
• Collect feedback with automated surveys

AI-powered Self-serve Conversational Tools

No-code AI tools

• Choose from a list of pre-built bot templates
• Customise its content and instantly publish it
• Launch a fully functional Travel bot in minutes

Low-code AI tools

• Create your conversation flow with a graphical editor via flow builder
• Create detailed and advanced conversational bots
• Use easy point-and-click tools

Yo-code AI Tools

• Get scripting tools for modelling dialogs
• Link with tools like Dialogflow and Rasa

Pre-trained Travel-specific AI models

• Automate pre-bookings, instant bookings, customer support, and payments
• Create consultative-selling workflows

NLP-on-the-Fly

• Get an API to process natural language queries
• This module does not require any extra training

Messaging Solutions

• Single API for messaging channels
  You can easily interact and transact with your travellers and guests seamlessly across 30+ messaging channels, including SMS, WhatsApp, GIP, RCS, Telegram, with our single API for messaging.
• Payments via messaging
  Offer your customers the option to make easy and quick payments via our 1-click bill pay solution.
• Advanced APIs for automation
  Get pre-built and customisable sequences to plug in, use and accelerate the automation of key travel and hospitality workflows by integrating our advanced APIs.

Benefits to the Travel and Hospitality companies

Conversational AI-powered chatbots help  travel and hospitality companies to cater to the needs and demands of their digitally savvy travellers and get multifold benefits in return.

• Easy integration
  Integrate with your existing Property Management Software, Flight Booking Suite, CRM, website/app and IT infrastructure to give a holistic experience to guests.
• Support customers 24×7
  You can provide round the clock assistance to your customers. Give real-time help during a trip and resolve issues that usually arise during travel.
• Automate your workflows
  Easily convert digital workflows on your website and official app, such as purchase of packages to conversational workflows.
• Reduce operational costs
  Marginally reduce and control overhead costs by reducing staff involvement and deploying an AI-layer for intelligent conversations.
• Stay ahead of competition
  In the tough markets, gain a competitive edge over other travel agencies in terms of customer experience, advanced technology and customer loyalty.
• Be available on all messaging channels
  We help integrate across all popular messaging channels. Leverage our unmatched channel, operator and handset partnerships. You can even engage with and monetise your followers with our Messenger API for Instagram.

#LetsGupshup

A conversational messaging platform provides two distinct but interconnected capabilities – the ability to define conversational experiences for commerce, marketing and support using chatbots and the ability to deploy these experiences on any messaging channel using a single messaging API. Gupshup enables all this and more.

Gupshup helps enable better customer engagement through conversational messaging. Gupshup is the leading conversational messaging platform, powering over 6 billion messages per month. Across verticals, thousands of large and small businesses in emerging markets use Gupshup to build conversational experiences across marketing, sales and support. Gupshup’s carrier-grade platform provides a single messaging API for 30+ channels, a rich conversational experience-building tool kit for any use case and a network of emerging market partnerships across messaging channels, device manufacturers, ISVs and operators. With Gupshup, businesses have made conversations an integral part of their customer engagement success.

Initiate a conversation with us to know more about Gupshup for Travel. #LetsGupshup