Hotel chatbots have made a significant contribution in the travel and tourism industry. There has been a hike of over 7.6 trillion U.S. dollars in 2016. A number of countries, like France and the United States, have been working towards expanding their tourism.
Tourism can induce the local government to improve the infrastructure, giving rise to many small businesses and organizations. All of this can improve the quality of life for residents as well as facilitate tourism.
With the rise of tourism and the economic benefits linked to tourism, small hotel businesses are also arising. Let’s touch upon the evolution of the hotel industry and how artificial intelligence tools for automation have been playing a significant role in it!
The hotel industry and automation
Ever since tourism arose in the market, the hotel business has been booming with new, innovative ways of automating several tasks, such as bookings, finding the location, customer support, broadcast messages, promotions, and marketing. One such ideal tool for automation for hoteliers are hotel chatbots!
Chatbots were one of 2017's most important trends. These small pieces of software use natural language processing (NLP) to enable you to communicate naturally with them and simulate a human being's behaviour in a conversational environment. It can be integrated across various channels, like the hotel website, social media or mobile apps, allowing the hotel industry to ‘humanize’ their brand, access to a wider audience and elevate the customer experience (CX) to their benefit.
Abandoned bookings at hotels
One persistent problem every hotelier faces- abandoned bookings. A recent survey ' Why do guests leave their reservations? ' highlights the main reasons why direct bookings have been abandoned:
If you’ve ever been in the hotel industry, you will remember the Hilton hotels ad campaign ' Stop Clicking Around ' running in February 2016. It was a bold initiative from Hilton, encouraging the guests directly browse, select and book hotel rooms and services from their mobile app and hotel website.
Slowly, that emerged to a trend where every large-scale hotel chain started using websites and apps for marketing and to expand their online presence. Websites became the common tool to get in touch with the hotel for information, customer service, room bookings and entertainment like images, videos, blogs, etc.
While big brands have the capital and resources to undertake such initiatives, most of the small-scale hotels end up losing traffic and bookings to OTAs.
There is an ongoing effort in the hospitality industry to reverse this trend, although it needs to cover a lot of ground. Some of the hoteliers say they prioritize their guest-facing digital assets to deliver more while maintaining pocket-friendly marketing efforts. Much of their focus remains on websites, social media and messaging, a crossroad where agile technologies such as chatbots take shape.
A majority of the hotel websites under-deliver these days, discouraging a majority of the visitors from converting into customers. To catch hold of booking, a hotel has to overcome a few challenges.
The competition from the neighbourhood hotels should be one, and fulfilling the guests’ requirements would be second, including- price, brand, location, food & drinks, technology, speedy wi-fi, activities, user reviews, etc.
The decline of potential leads
A robust technology stack contributes to an effective website, transforming the user experience. The main factors being:
The Channel Manager
A channel manager is a system that links the PMS to other online booking sites, such as Airbnb, Booking.com or Expedia. This helps owners to change prices, availability of calendars and bookings simultaneously across a number of platforms.
The Booking Engine
A hotel booking engine is an application on hotel websites used to securely process online bookings. The purpose of a hotel booking engine is to allow bookings to be made: directly on the hotel's own website; and third-party websites such as Facebook, on which your hotel is listed.
The Property Management System (PMS)
A property management system (PMS) is a software application for hospitality and commercial residential property rental operations. PMS is also used in manufacturing, local government, and many other industries. PMS provides a centralized computer system for organizing, scheduling and carrying out the day-to-day functions and transactions involved in hosting businesses.
How do hotel chatbots help the hotel industry with bookings?
Due to conventional technology, the methods small-scale industries use aren’t reaching their objectives. Hence, pushing the use of chatbot technology in the right direction. Think about it, chatbots are:
And this isn't even the full list-It’s definitely a smart move to throw a customer support chatbot into the mix!
Chatbot integration with different systems acts as direct communication with guests. They can also be easily integrated across various channels, like hotel websites, messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Slack, Kik, etc, and social media channels such as Facebook. This allows the hotels to build a strong online occupancy and reach out to a multitude of target audience easily.
Not only can hotel chatbots be prepared to showcase features, services, hotel amenities, and local attractions, they can also seamlessly push visitors to the website and down the booking path. Besides, the transactions are one-to-one, so the hotels may take advantage of this opportunity to offer the best online room rate available with smart reward marketing such as a continuous promotion or special deals to drive direct booking. The booking chatbot can facilitate online check-in once the guest has the booking reference number and help them avoid the queues at the reception desk.
Integrating a chatbot to PMS requires less manual interventions. This enables the customers to have a seamless conversational experience during their stay at the hotel. They can access information by texting or directly talking to the chatbot and it will assist them in any way they need. Okay, probably not ANY. But most of the common queries and guest requests. If unable to help, a chatbot will directly connect you to the hotel representatives for further support.
Post-stay: hotel bots are packaging the ability to complete the circuit - hotels can now stay connected during their journey with their guests. Hotel chatbots will keep the guest engagement alive with automatic reviews and messages even after their stay which contributes to building a loyal customer fanbase.
Personalized travel-based rebooking deals will keep guests in the booking funnel even when they are not a part of the hotel's loyalty management system. For example, for the next trip, a package deal can be given to a guest to keep them interested in activities around the hotel.
Booking Chatbots with Machine Learning not only continue to develop responses but also to better characterize the visitors. The right technology will keep the interaction going, making the restaurant chatbots with time more stable. The OTAs also mastered the art of optimizing the booking experience to simplify the process.
To sum it up
The use of hotel and booking chatbots is still evolving, but it currently includes a wide range of services, ranging from hotel reservations and customer service enquiries to pre-stay and post-stay inquiries and online travel agencies.
One successful implementation of chatbots in the hotel industry comes from the hotel booking bot by Engati. It’s a simple bot that allows the customers to book hotel rooms and services directly from the chatbot and can be integrated on various mediums.
Visit Engati, the best chatbot platform.
If you haven’t considered a chatbot for your hotel business yet, you could start now!
Schedule your chatbot demo now!
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