Chatbots in hospitality industry

Chatbots can be simply defined as artificial intelligence programs that conduct conversations with humans through chat interfaces. Chatbot can be considered as personal assistants who can respond to inquiries or give recommendations on a certain topic in a real-time.

Most advanced chatbots mostly use artificial intelligence or natural language. They can understand really complicated requests and can also improve by machine learning and can personalize answers. Other not-so-advanced chatbots scan for keywords in the input and then they reply with a matching answer from a database.

This type of chatbot can only answer some simple questions and it doesn’t understand the context of the question. That’s why it can give wrong answers. According to the explanation of chatbots, there are two types of them.

Types of chatbots:

1. The most complex is driven by machine learning and artificial intelligence. This type of chatbot understands language and commands, and learns as it goes along.

2. The second is driven by a set of predetermined answers that are pre-programmed and driven by a set of rules. These need to be manually programmed and tend to represent a large set of frequently asked questions.

According to a report from BI Intelligence in 2016, for the first time ever, messaging apps have now caught up with social networks in terms of users. In fact, messaging apps are now even more popular than social networks.

The combined global monthly active users of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn are between 3 and 3.5 billion, which lags compared to the combined active users of messenger apps including WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat, and Viber at around 3.7 billion.

According to the BI Intelligence report, we can conclude and predict that in the near future there will be an exponential increase in the use of messenger apps and less social networking apps.

This does not mean that the social networking app will disappear and lose its purpose, but that chatbots will take over control of it and in the background browse the information on social networking apps and other web sites for us.

According to Bebot’s creators, Bespoke Inc., the current hospitality industry can benefit greatly from chatbots. There are many benefits, and these are just some of them:

· Chatbots can be used as a reservation channel to get direct booking

· Chatbots will help hotels to build a proper and accurate guest profiling, allowing them to provide personalized offers to their guests, which will increase guest loyalty

· Since chatbots are a 24/7 service, it will reduce reception workload, giving guests instant and helpful answers in any moment of their stay

· Chatbots stay connected with guests right from the pre-arrival stage to post-departure which increases guest loyalty and the number of repeated visits.

· Guests can check-in as well as check-out on the fly with the help of a chatbot

· Guests can opt-in for in-room services and get notified from chatbots about the places to visit, the tariffs for the hotel’s cars with exciting images and videos

Booking.com

Booking.com soft-launch a chat tool to allow guests to interact with hotels where they hold a reservation, through their own website. Hotels receive questions via the Pulse for Accommodation Partners App. Intended to be gradually rolled-out for all hotels throughout 2016.

GuestU

GuestU announces GuestUBot, a BaaS (Bot-as-a-Service) platform for the hospitality industry to increase direct bookings and enhance guests’ experience through Facebook Messenger.

Skyscanner

Skyscanner launches a bot for Facebook Messenger to allow flight booking through the App, or booking of other services by chatting to an actual human.

From a business perspective, using a chatbot can have many benefits for your company. Customer loyalty can be increased with a mixture of personalized, relevant content delivered by the bot in conjunction with integrations to the best communication platforms. This gives your business a chance to concentrate on other areas of opportunity such as mapping out plans to increase repeat business and gaining loyalty for future travels.

From a customer experience perspective a chatbot can increment and enhance the correspondence with visitors and visitor engagement. This way will enable customers to discover and book their accommodation directly in the messaging app.

Moreover, obtaining customer reviews post stay or getting customers feedback immediately in chat is going to be much less invasive via a chatbot compared to traditional surveys, which is often ignored or annoying to fill out. To be able to respond with one-click to a question will undoubtedly improve the customer engagement response rate. This way personalization options are endless. Hotels can provide customized offers or options instantly and directly through chat, at any point before, during or after their stay.

By reading these examples and benefits we can safely say that the future of chatbots is bright and shinning.

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