Can Chatbots Really Enhance the Holiday Travel Experience?
'Tis The Season to Look at The Future of Guest Messaging
Chatbots have begun to shape almost every area of our lives. From menial tasks like providing weather forecasts to helping us make important financial decisions, and even replicating yourself, there seems to be no limit to what chatbots can help us do.
One area that has seen a particularly noteworthy explosion of bots is the travel industry. From Expedia's Facebook Messenger hotel search chatbot, CheapFlights' big personality flight and hotel bot, to Carla, the personal travel assistant who can help you pack for your trip, travel and, hospitality companies are investing a lot of resources into creating chatbots to assist us along our journeys.
Putting Travel Bots through the Holiday Ringer
With more than 100 million Americans preparing to travel this holiday season, this time of year is the barometer for the state of the travel and hospitality industries.
This year it will also be a measuring stick for how travel chatbots are performing today and a window into how they could evolve the traveling experience for the better in the future. Let's take a look at the current state of holiday travel with chatbots and where they may take us.
Automating Instantaneous Travel
Google released data earlier this year that found 60% of travelers would impulse-book a trip. That research also found a 150% surge in travel-related searches for "today" and "tonight". The move towards last-minute and nearly real-time travel booking puts a crunch on airlines, hotels and other travel-related services trying to answer consumer requests with a human hand or a traditional, pull-based, website.
Human support worked in the travel space when travel was more about the weeks and months ahead. As the mobile internet has transitioned travel into an industry that is more about the hours and even minutes ahead – seconds matter. And simply put, a human can't be available 86,400 seconds a day. Therefore, making a human the gatekeeper of real-time bookings turns them into a bigger roadblock than a helper. The same could be said of web-based travel services that rely on pulling large swaths of information out of travelers to suggest and book trips.
As nearly 40% of online travel sales come to mobile devices, chatbots are best positioned to automate instantaneous travel. Of course, companies like Airbnb and Hotel Tonight are already capitalizing on this shift towards more real-time travel. However, chatbots can turn real-time booking on its head by both automating the entire experience and pushing more relevant information in front of travelers.
Take the Skyscanner chatbot for instance. Via a streamlined chat field on Facebook, you can simply type where you are headed and when – in the same way you'd text your husband, wife or favorite travel companion. From there, the bot will quickly text back your options. And, if you're not sure where to go just type 'anywhere' and the bot will serve up some recommendations for you. This is an example of why in the future ease of use will be a 'nice to have' for travel chatbots, but the speed of booking will be key.
The Personal Chatbot Concierge
The majority of travel bots today are designed to help us get to our destinations. However, in the future, bots will also be adept at enabling us to get the most out of our journeys once we've arrived.
With hotel bookings on mobile devices up 67% in the U.S. last year, hotel guests – especially younger guests – are primed for mobile messaging interaction with their hotel upon check-in. A survey we commissioned with Google last month of 824 prospective hotel guests found that 52% of millennials would rather chat by text message with hotel staff versus talking over the phone.
As guests move towards preferring this type of chatbot interaction on site, it's easy to envision a not so distant time where IoT devices are merged with automated travel bots, creating tour guides that are with you every step of your trip.
Waking up on the first morning of a Christmas vacation in Europe and not sure what to do? Simply ask your voice-enabled travel bot on your smartwatch to automate an itinerary, and guide you along your day. The key to this working effectively is personalization.
For a bot to be able to plan an unforgettable day in a foreign country it needs to have much more than access to reviews and recommendations. It needs a real understanding of who the traveler is – from their personality and past behaviors to purchase habits and overall communication preferences.
Take things a step further, a bot that is integrated with your health app could make itinerary decisions based on things like lack of sleep (recommending activities that don't require a lot of energy), high cholesterol (providing a list of restaurants with healthy options), and many other things that wouldn't require you to cut corners on your health regimen during vacation.
And with international travel projected to increase by 35% over the next decade, designers would do well to program their bots to make traveling overseas a smoother process for the linguistically challenged. While there are plenty of translation bots out there, imagine a bot that can not only plan your day and get you to where you need to go, but one that can instantly translate the words spoken to you and help you reply in the native language of wherever you are.
Jet-Lagged Language Processing
While chatbots have the potential to disrupt the travel experience for the better, and offer businesses worldwide the chance to save $8 billion annually by 2022, there are some issues that need to be addressed before they can bring us directly into travel's future.
Chatbots were created to make things easier. However, in many cases their interactions can actually have the opposite effect. This is why 40% of a bot's users only interact one time. There are several factors that contribute to this high rate of churn.
For one, the majority of bots today are based on a decision-tree logic, where the response given by the chatbot is based on specific keywords that the communicant uses. This means that a given bot's effectiveness is directly correlated with the skill and thoroughness of their designer to program for a seemingly infinite amount of use cases and inputs. Given the range that needs to be accounted for, especially in a complex environment such as travel where variables can change at a moment's notice, it's no surprise that bots make mistakes.
For that reason, some of the most successful chatbots are transparent with their users and make it clear that they are not speaking with another human. In that use case, they are perfect for customer-centric travel organizations.
They are 24/7 frontline customer care specialists that even in their early stages are adept at handling basic queries on demand. Frequently asked questions, such as "what restaurants are nearby?" can be answered with the timeliness that customers expect today. From reducing overhead to improving customer service, there's no doubt that chatbots are already making a positive impact on the travel experience.
Chabots have enormous potential to improve the travel industry. While companies should be commended for experimenting with and developing chatbots today, it's important that they don't lose sight of what humans are best at; providing personalized experiences.
So if you're using bots to help you travel to family for holidays, maybe in Memphis, just understand that you're dealing with a robot and not a human. Otherwise, you might end up having a very lonely holiday in Memphis, Egypt.
Ford Blakely is the CEO and founder of Zingle, a two-way, business-to-customer messaging platform for leading hospitality companies.
About Zingle, Inc.
Zingle is a two-way, intelligent hotel guest messaging software platform that allows hotels to engage with guests in a real-time and personalized way through messaging. The platform helps hotels and resorts increase efficiency, revenue, and customer loyalty by providing a quick and simple way to communicate with customers. For more information visit www.zingle.me/industries/hospitality
