Hospitality brings an interesting question for you as a customer. Every time you go on a vacation, is it the same experience at different restaurants and hotels? Are you completely satisfied and think that the hospitality industry gives you a smooth, hassle-free solution? If your answer is no then this article will come to you like a breeze.
AI combined with NLP can help better the user experience with minimum fuss. According to Business Insider, around 80% of businesses will use some sort of AI or chatbot by the year 2022. So don’t be surprised if you see a scarce number of humans interacting with you in the nearby future.
How are chatbots & AI used in the hotel industry?
Chatbots are an advanced AI technology that produce user-appropriate outputs. Customers benefit due to the NLP technology and ML capabilities that chatbots are built with. In recent years, chatbots have made considerable news in the tech market. Chatbots can be trained to improve their answers over time and give personalised responses for more customer engagement. Hospitality Chatbots remember conversations and through their intelligent feedback systems, they can suggest content for you based on your chat history.
How can AI be used in hospitality?
Imagine a user looking to know more about their travel itinerary. The user has ample questions and the travel agent or hotelier has only the option of teleservices. The user will first go through the lengthy process of IVR and 'might' select the right option after trying three or four times. After that hurdle has been crossed, the voice will ask the user to wait as all the operators are busy at the moment. What do you think the user will do? The natural response would be - getting frustrated and putting the phone down.
Now imagine a super fast and super efficient chatbot in place of the IVR and Voila! We now have the following in hospitality-
Get more and more through hospitality chatbots with less! Less cost, less time consumption, less manpower, less redundancies. A pure win-win situation.
Hospitality chatbots on messaging platforms
According to Global Web Index Statistics, almost 75% of internet users adopt at least one messaging platform. Chatbots are capable of being integrated with many social platforms and the most powerful ones are the Facebook Messenger Chatbots & WhatsApp Chatbots. Almost every millennial now uses Messenger, spending a large amount of time texting rather than calling. For all those introverted travellers planning a vacation and talking to several agents can be a jittery task. Hospitality chatbots are here just for the same purpose, except that they don’t waste your time and instead give you sharp, concise answers. Chatbots can help you select the right places at the right prices, all on one single platter.
Hospitality chatbots for customers
Hospitality chatbots can instantaneously answer your doubts and place bookings for a hotel, reserve tables at a restaurant, or even book you for a Thai spa! Chatbots stay connected with the customer 24x7, right from their booking through their entire stay, assisting them with any issues or grievances. Messaging apps make this interaction extremely convenient and customers are likely to remain happy through their stay. Many hotels now have their own bots deployed on messaging platforms or on their websites. GRT, Hyatt, Marriott, The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas among many other hotel chains are using chatbots to a good extent for the purpose of serving customers better in their services and content.
AI chatbots breaking language barriers
One important function that a multilingual chatbot provides is translation on-the-go. For the hospitality industry, this is a huge relief as they look at global traffic and language is the last thing they probably want to deal with. Translation by a bot keeps things smooth and does not let the customer down. If anything, it helps build loyalty and relations with their customers.
Conclusion
It may become very likely that for your next vacation, you would interact with a travel bot instead of a human agent. Don’t forget to remember you read it here first. Chatbots are likely to reign a considerable part of your life in the future.
To get closer to the future, we have built a DIY chatbot platform called Engati. You can even train it as per needs. The platform is actually quite easy to use. So, if you haven’t checked it out yet then come and take a look.
Chatbots in the hospitality industry are on the rage. Build your own personalized hospitality chatbot by registering on Engati today, for free!
