The travel and hospitality industry bore a significant brunt of the impact of the pandemic. In 2020, Asia Pacific, a fast-growing travel sector, was curbed by travel regulations. Long-term plans to improve the industry’s digital capabilities took a hit, with 36% of travel executives saying Covid-19 negatively impacted their digital transformation plans.

As travel resumes to pre-pandemic levels, the travel and hospitality industry is finally recovering. With the sudden surge in demand, airlines and hotels must be prepared to face high numbers of customer enquiries and bookings.

Travellers today are cautious when making an online booking. They must be able to get immediate responses for any of their concerns to ultimately lead them to complete a booking. Airlines and hotel companies today need highly advanced and proficient tools to meet the current and upcoming demands while ensuring excellent customer service.

To close the gap between pandemic concerns and delivering service excellence, digital transformation efforts have been accelerated amongst travel and hospitality brands. Nearly half of travel and hospitality companies surveyed in Asia Pacific say that machine learning and artificial intelligence can help them define new business opportunities, and stay flexible and be ahead of the competition. One of the ways of improving guest experience is through the use of AI chatbots.

A travel and hospitality chatbot is a great conversational AI-driven solution to attract and retain potential customers. With the ability to simulate natural human conversation, the AI chatbot provides quick and easy access to booking information and other frequently asked questions. It not only relieves the customer service team from attending to common queries but also allows them to focus their time on more high-value tasks and urgent customer concerns.

While the chatbot is ideally the human touch a customer wants when engaging with a brand, the chatbot is more than that for a travel and hospitality brand. Think of the travel and hospitality chatbot as a virtual assistant that relies on AI technology to predict customer behaviour, recommend, cross-sell and upsell certain services and more.

Aside from all the great points listed above, here are some advantages of integrating AI chatbots like AiChat into the marketing strategy of travel and hospitality brands.

If you typically have to get your guests to email you for an enquiry about a reservation, imagine how much time will be saved if you could reply to your customer almost immediately. Plus, AI virtual assistants can pull answers to common questions from the brand knowledge base. This improves the guest experience you offer and keeps your customer service scores high. You can inform interested parties about promotions and deals instantly. It’s much easier to turn happy customers into loyal ones.

Automated responses effectively decrease the workload of your customer service staff. They can now focus on more crucial tasks and face-to-face interactions with guests who are already at your check-in counters. Another capability of smart AI chatbots is detecting customers’ emotions whether they are frustrated with sentiment analysis which helps businesses to quickly prioritise and resolve the most pressing queries. Your team will be able to efficiently manage peak period traffic, reducing customer complaints. This translates to a considerable amount of customer service cost savings of up to 30%.

When you integrate your chatbots with social media advertising on Messenger or offer your guests discount vouchers in return for their marketing communications subscription, this essentially speeds up the lead generation process. Knowing the people you are talking to will also help you profile your guests and run remarketing campaigns with more efficiency. When you have promotions or deals, you can also send automated broadcast messages to a database that is already engaged with your travel or hospitality brand.

When it comes to the travel or hospitality industry, AI chatbots can be used for direct and quick communication with guests. Here are some examples of when communication can happen through an AI chatbot powered by AiChat.

• Booking Assistance

Through natural dialogue, guests can chat and select preferred flight dates, questions about ticketing terms and conditions, location of stay, check-in date and number of nights stay to receive room recommendations.

• Quick Info Access

For hospitality brands, you can customise your main menu in the chatbot to highlight room information, facilities, events, stay packages, restaurant menus and more. You can go the extra mile to facilitate reservations and customer service assistance as well.

• Promote Offers and Deals

Make it easy for travellers and guests to access the best rates you have to offer. Chatbots can check in at various points in the customer journey, offering various targeted segments anything from a better seat, a better hotel room view, discounts on dining packages, and more using message broadcasts or Messenger recurring notifications.

• Local Navigation and Guide

Besides assisting customers with locating the hotel, the chatbot can also act as a local guide. Load information to help guests explore more dining, attractions and nearby events within the neighbourhood of your hotel or airport.

• Gamification for Lead Generation

Take it a step further by running contests, quizzes or giveaways to increase brand awareness and generate leads. Using AiChat, a chatbot can automate engagement on social media and even distribute digital vouchers for winners in the chat inbox.

• Omnichannel Engagement

Being where your customers are and staying on top of travellers’ minds will be crucial to the success of any hospitality brands. Connect and drive engagement with guests no matter where they hang out: Messenger, Instagram Direct Message, WhatsApp and website.

At AiChat, we’ve worked with several leading brands in the region through our proprietary hybrid AI technology with built-in, industry-specific capabilities.

Here are some examples of how popular brands in the travel and hospitality industry have improved their campaign results through the implementation of our chatbot.

There’s no introduction needed for a brand name like this one, but even Marina Bay Sands realised the potential of integrating chatbots into Meta platforms including Facebook and Instagram. They used the chatbot to provide guests with hotel booking support, shop and dine recommendations, dynamic itinerary building plus retargeting ads.Video: Marina Bay Sands virtual concierge chatbotUsing Messenger integration on their Facebook Retarget Ads, Marina Bay Sands managed to reap the following benefits:

• 3X unique CTR

• 6:25 minutes of average engagement rate

• 730% growth in user acquisition

While Marina Bay Sands fully utilised the power of Messenger & Instagram to chat with guests, Hatten Hotel Melaka took it a step further by implementing AiChat’s conversational experience on their brand website and WhatsApp channel. Hatten Hotel also leveraged several gamification campaigns to boost engagement.Image: Hatten Hotel Melaka WhatsApp hospitality chatbot Through the chatbot, Hatten Hotel Melaka saw:

• 75% enquiries handled by chatbot

• 3:28 minutes of average engagement rate

• 48.6% campaign participation rate

The management of HomeTeamNS put themselves in the shoes of their members and wanted to make the process of booking their facilities and services more seamless. The company used AiChat for their clubhouse information, customer service support, booking, user profiling and segmentation, and personalised offer recommendations.Video: HomeTeamNS chatbotThrough the chatbot’s integration, HomeTeamNS received the following results:

• 88% enquiries handled by chatbot

• 70% live chat requests resolved within SLA solution time

• 15% decrease in customer service support

A travel and hospitality chatbot used by airlines, hotels and attraction sites can contribute to better customer service support, higher customer satisfaction, and the company’s bottom line.

With AiChat, travel and hospitality brands can now build smarter, more predictive virtual assistants that leverage data to solve specific business challenges. You can support your customer from multiple touchpoints, through a user-friendly dashboard. Gain insights through analytics and capture your customer’s feedback even after live chat ends.

One tool, multiple benefits. Get in touch to find out how we can help you reach your ideal customer through conversational chatbots that help to improve guest experience.AiChat is a leading A.

I-Powered Conversational Customer Experience platform designed to help brands automate business processes in customer service, marketing and commerce via popular social messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram and Google Business Messages etc. We are proudly trusted by Bayer, TESCO, Marina Bay Sands, MR D.

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Y, Mondelēz, Petron, Unilever and many other enterprises and SMEs across South East Asia.