The travel industry has expanded a lot since the last few years. Gone are those days when travellers used to go to their local travel agents to get their tickets booked. The new age traveller who is tech-savvy always wants more. With this increasing demand, the travel industry has to come up with innovative ideas to entice the traveller.

According to Expedia, travellers visit 38 sites on an average while planning a trip. The whole hustle begins from googling and ends with online travel agencies. They go through this task just to find the best-fit travel plan for them. This fact clearly shows the need for personalized solutions and streamlined travel experience.

Understanding this problem, we can solve this very conventionally by unifying the experience in a single platform. To avoid any kind of confusion and to make things simpler for the customer voice bots can be used. These voice bots are mobile-friendly personal assistants with analytical and predictive skills. This can give the best solution to the traveller for which he is actually looking for. This will not only give a great expansion to the travel industry but also the pioneer solution for customer satisfaction.

Benefits of Voicebots in the travel industry

 

 

Customer engagement and personalized experience:

 

A voice bot which is available 24×7, 365 days a year helps in providing great personalized customer service. This boost travellers’ experiences in every stage such as pre-arrival to the post-trip experience. Travel bots such as AI Timey are able to solve queries, give recommendations, initiate transactions or just have casual interactions. 

For example, voice bots assist potential customers by giving them multiple options to book their holidays. Once the booking is done, it starts sending out automated reminders to travellers about the booking date, time and their reservations in advance. When they arrive at the destination guest will receive a suggestion from the bots about the location, like hotels, spa treatments, transport facilities, and so on. With this, the brand value also increases as the customer service is available for the travellers anytime. Their problems can be resolved immediately even as they travel across time zones. 

The interactivity and feeling of flexibility, the voice bot offers a customer is sure to boost engagement, especially when compared to the traditional option of making the customer fill a long static survey form with limited options. Check out this case study here.

 

Cost Efficiency

 

Using a bot is highly cost-effective. With the power of artificial intelligence, voice bots are able to solve many customer problems.  Additionally, new travel startups can skip app development and directly move to bots to save resources. The implementation costs of voice bots are coming down and many service providers have also emerged. Most small businesses and enterprises that, at times, receive thousands of informational requests a day still chose to address them via a phone line. Hence, they pay a fee for a toll-free number, which is indeed extremely high and even after that the clients are not satisfied. Holding for long and then still not getting a satisfactory solution is really frustrating for a customer. The cost-per-chat for a voice bot is potentially one-twentieth of the cost-per-chat for a human agent! Additionally, check why is this hike in the google lead pricing here.

 

Cross-sell and Upsell

 

As per the reports by Google, 65% of the holiday travellers and 69% of the business travellers go online to plan their travel. Research says 92% of millennials are pleased with live chat and 23% are predicted to travel and spend $1.4 trillion by 2020. 

Voice bots are capable of providing solutions to the travel industries to build a powerful relationship with the customers. Hence they will be able to create more opportunities that will increase revenue through the cross and upsell. This is great to increase the ROI and get the maximum customer engagement.

 

Access to data

 

Voice bots have the capability to record their communication with the users and collect data that gives insights to provide the customer experience. This helps in getting the 360-degree view of their customers. Gathering valuable customer data is one way how Voice bots are revolutionizing the entire travel industry. Using the insights generated from voice bots, companies can send personalized marketing messages. voice bots thus, create fantastic opportunities for the travel industry by enhancing customer experience with enlightened service.

 

Alternative staff and customer service

 

Voice bots are trained in such a way that they can interact with humans at twice the speed. They deliver seamless customer service. Whether it is about communicating urgent information or providing solutions to immediate problems, voice bots can handle it all irrespective of the different time zones and this is very beneficial for international travellers.

 

Enhanced reservations

 

Voice bots can get all the data and information from the customer like his date of arrival and departure, preferred location etc. By this, a bot can easily suggest the hotel destinations too. Once a user is presented with a list of hotels to choose from he can them book the room and make payments from the bot itself. This will make the task of booking simpler for the customers with all requirements catered at one platform only. 

 

Eliminate the language barrier

 

It is important that the prospective audience of the company is expanded and this can be done regardless of the native language of the customer. Voice bots can also be trained in the same with the predefined templates that can help to interact with customers all over the world. 

For example, Booking.com uses such templates which has pre-translated questions and replies that allow hotels to chat with the customers in 42 languages.

 

Saved user history:

Voice bots have a feature of saving all the previously discussed data through conversational history. A user will always be able to return to the previous suggestions and have all important information saved in a single conversation flow. Voice bots make it uncomplicated to return to the previously discussed data because the conversation history stays available to customers. 

Voice bots serve to enhance customer experience, boosting their engagement with your brand. They are far more efficient than human staff when it comes to dealing with routine enquiries. They are rich and constantly replenishing the source of consumer data. And they are a very attractive prospect indeed from a cost-saving and revenue-generation perspective. 

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