Travel Chatbot — How Chatbots Can Help City Tourism
Online chatbots have already proved their merits when it comes to bringing in business and providing customer support. Both of these are factors that the tourism industry heavily relies on. As players in a competitive field, travel agencies, hotel booking services, and other businesses built around travel and tourism need to keep assessing their offerings to make sure that they draw and retain enough customers. With travel chatbot development, they can do that and more.
I work at VirtualSpirits, a company which develops chatbots, and with this experience in mind we’ll focus on why travel chatbots are the way ahead for travel and tourism related businesses.
One travel chatbot window for all the answers
Travel apps can be useful for tourists — or they can be seen as bloatware. The most common complaint that travelers have with these apps is that each one of them focuses on a different niche. For example, one app provides information on tourist attractions in a particular city. Another offers real-time weather updates. Yet another manages flights and hotel bookings. For the average tourist, these can add up to a significant amount of storage space on their phone. Further, many of them become redundant after one trip, and need to be replaced with a different app.
Travel chatbots offer a cleaner alternative. Online chatbots for websites and messaging apps have one thing in common — they don’t create bloatware on your device. Instead, they use existing platforms like browsers or messenger apps that almost everyone has on their phone. As such, they make it possible for travelers to receive notifications, updates and promotional offers, without downloading separate apps for each of the services they’ll be using during their trip.
All one needs to do is ask
When it comes to searching for information or assistance, nothing beats the simplicity of asking a simple question, in your own words, and receiving the exact answer you’re seeking. This is where even the best travel websites and smartphone apps tend to fall short. They may offer attractive holiday packages and room tariffs, or extremely detailed information about sightseeing destinations and city services. But if users have to navigate through multiple layers of information to get to what they’re looking for, they might end up abandoning the process midway.
Conversations with travel chatbots are refreshingly different. Someone interested in exploring a new city can just head to the chat window and ask a question like, “What are the 10 best things to do in <City>?”
Even typing keywords like “restaurants”, “museums”, “shopping” or “hiking” will produce useful and relevant information about places they can go to. The best chatbots for tourism services also integrate features like directions and guest reviews with their suggestions, helping tourists make the right choices based on their schedule, budget, and other preferences.
Travel chatbots get smarter with time
Webpages and app menus require some getting used to. Users need to familiarize themselves with the options available on them, and after a few visits, they might be able to complete their hotel searches and flight bookings faster. But travel chatbots take the game to a whole new level.
Instead of asking users to get to know the tourism service better, AI bots work the other way round. They use machine learning to identify commonly used phraseology and search terms, and actually get more attuned to travelers’ preferences over time. Besides, chat scripts can always be updated based on records of prior conversations with users. Travel chatbot development is thus a dynamic process; over the course of their interactions with travelers, the bots get smarter and allow the tourism business to offer improved services and user experiences.
Travel chatbots help tourism services retain customers
Websites and apps are static in the sense that they don’t adapt to visitors’ needs in real time. If a tourist is unable to find the information they need on a travel app, for example, they’ll close it and move on to a different source of information. But if they’re in conversation with a chatbot, they can either get the details from the bot itself, or get connected to a staff member who is better equipped to answer their questions.
Chatbots and human employees of a travel-related service can thus work together to offer tourists a well-rounded experience. They’re also able to retain a higher number of customers due to the proactive customer support that they can offer when they team up in this manner.
More and more businesses in the tourism industry are building chatbots to offer better services. If you’d like more information or assistance with your chatbot development needs, feel free to contact VirtualSpirits team.
About VirtualSpirits
VirtualSpirits is the leading website chatbot platform for businesses. Powering +12,000 chatbots for customer service, lead generation, and sales around the world.
