How Chatbots are Revolutionizing Travel & Hospitality Sectors
Table of Contents
Introduction
People travel at least once a year to take a break from tedious, monotonous lives. During their holiday or business trip, all they expect is a comfortable accommodation, easy navigation, and great hospitality. However, the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted the travel and hospitality industry drastically.
The main concern is nothing but everyone’s safety. The fundamental motive of the travel and hospitality industry is to provide personalized services, client’s comfort, efficiency, and overall Customer Experience. They focus on delivering the best service so that their customers leave with a satisfying experience.
Considering the pandemic, avoiding human contact is the most important protocol for the clients/customers’ safety. The travel & hospitality industry is thriving with the help of chatbot technology. Chatbots for the travel and hospitality industry guide customers at all levels. Whether it’s about booking accommodation or cancellation of a flight, chatbots can make it easy for the travel and hospitality industry to empower customers to seamlessly search, compare and book their journey and accommodation by providing a wide range of options and information over a conversation.
Chatbots advantages for travel & hospitality industry

Encourage direct booking assistance
Most travelers prefer direct bookings to avoid paying more, thinking the OTA website bookings need to pay a certain amount of commission so it might be costly.
Businesses can enable direct booking assistance for customers/clients by deploying AI chatbots on their company’s website, social media, and messenger platforms.
It presents the customer with relevant options to book directly, reducing the customer’s effort and time, and improving financial results.
24/7 customer assistance
Chatbots reduce the cost of human staff, which provides profitable offers and discounts for companies to attract customers. It minimizes the cost to serve, clarifies specific aspects of the products and services on offer, and encourage profits by accurately and quickly replying to common queries related to journey schedules, check-in baggage details, technical work, location details, reviews, bookings, reservations, cancellations, lost luggage, refund process, last moment changes, etc. Irrespective of the time difference, chatbots provide rapid customer service.
Personal travel assistant
Whether it’s FAQs, travel tips, recommendations, or advice, chatbots work as a personal travel agent that simplifies customers’ confusion regarding any location or reservation procedures by providing them relevant information.
It provides full booking journey assistance. For instance, while booking flights there are many considerations that need to be applied like departure and return date, luggage allowance, seat preferences, upgrades to first or business class, and airport terminal transfers. By integrating a chatbot, companies can potentially enhance the number of bookings and enrich the Customer Experience.
Multilingual functionality
The travel and hospitality business exists on a global basis. This requires any company to hire people who have multiple language expertise. An AI-powered chatbot offers multilingual assistance so that users or customers from across the world can get guidance without bothering due to the language barrier.
Chatbots are invaluable because they can authorize rapid language detection or translation, and respond automatically in the customers’ language. It can learn more languages than human staff.
Modified recommendations
AI-powered chatbots are designed to secure information provided by the customers so that they can use it to provide a better quality of recommendations. This helps chatbots understand the needs and preferences of the customer and suggest them with follow-up questions, analyze preferences to deliver tailored recommendations for customers’ booking process or travel experience. These suggestions could vary from recommending a hotel, activities to do, or promoting discounts and offers.
Staff augmentation
Chatbots reduce the cost of human staff as they complete tasks and respond to common customers issues at twice the speed of any human. This improves the overall operational efficiency, saves customers time, and excludes unnecessary back-ups.
It eliminates guest pain points at the front desk and allows the company to use the staff to focus on optimizing the guest experience. As a result, with add-on services and 24/7 customer service by the chatbots, companies can save the additional personnel, training, or payroll expenses.
Develop upselling & cross-selling opportunities
Maximum holiday and business travelers plan trips online. A chatbot allows companies to create stronger connections with customers by empowering seamless and personalized engagements across omnichannel, i.e, websites, apps, and other popular social media platforms.
It can be utilized to provide target-oriented offers based on the past conversations, purchases, and booking histories of the customers to educate them on current and forthcoming travel promotions.
Acquire customer feedback
The motive of any industry is to provide a seamless Customer Experience that can be improved after effective customer feedback. In this case, all aspects depend on understanding the needs, preferences, and expectations of travelers.
Thus, one of the sole advantages of deploying an AI chatbot is the ability to automatically take follow-ups with customers. This enables personalized follow-up processes in the form of email and mobile apps, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc. improving the probability of receiving responses.
Locobuzz chatbots for travel & hospitality
Chatbots for the travel and hospitality industry are now flourishing. One such example is India’s finest travel website MakeMyTrip. It offers an unforgettable Customer Experience by using AI-powered chatbots helping users with suggestions, and alerts of rail/flight/bus/car bookings, baggage information, and accommodation.
Locobuzz chatbots for travel and hospitality mainly incorporate the following:
- Driving direct sales by gathering customer details, travel dates, preferences, special demands, etc. to use on the booking engine for direct conversion, optimizing booking experience, navigation, and tracking feedback.
- Managing the scale of customer conversations and providing efficient support. It incorporates features that improve Customer Experience, customer insights and enhance the quality of services.
- Increasing operational efficiency by filtering questions & requests to provide instant automated relevant responses in multiple languages to repetitive queries while escalating the rest to the human staff for expert attention.
- Focuses on brand reputation management, tracking campaigns, crisis management, and a unified digital command center.
- Offering instant access to relevant information at every stage of the customer journey. Whether it’s location suggestions, amenities, services, or budget constraints, chatbots augment the visibility of products and services, curtails teams’ efforts, and fulfill customer expectations.
- With efficient CX management, chatbots provide improved customer service, identify potential churn drivers, and measure campaign effectiveness for sustaining customer loyalty and brand equity.
Conclusion
An AI-powered chatbot delivers many benefits, especially rapid customer service response times, favorable marketing messages, and considerable personalization. Well-designed chatbots can alter consumers’ awareness to conversion in a matter of minutes resulting in revenue generation.
FAQs | Chatbots for travel & hospitality industry
What is an AI Chatbot?
An AI chatbot is a computer solution that is built on artificial intelligence. It’s capable of comprehending and responding to human conversation. In general, chatbots such as these are designed to replicate convincingly the type of interaction users might experience with a human.
In the field of travel, AI chatbots are usually used as digital customer support agents, serving as the primary contact point for customers and offering useful details or intelligent solutions to inquiries. The most common way to use AI chatbots is via chat messages that are text-based however, they can also function by using speech recognition or voice.
What Features of an AI Chatbot are Essential?
The most efficient chatbot is equipped with features such as no code deployment and omnichannel messaging and fallback options, as well as sentiment analysis that can add the value of conversations.
The integration of chatbots will help your company provide automated, smart responses and help you achieve your marketing campaign goals effectively.
What is a Travel chatbot?
A chatbot for travel is an automatized software that can have an ongoing conversation with your potential customers to collect leads and make them qualified for your online marketing campaigns.
How can a chatbot be used in the hospitality industry?
In the hospitality industry, Chatbots are a computer program that can automatize an operation and removes the need for employees to finish the procedure. A chatbot, for instance, on your hotel’s site can answer questions of potential guests without having to dial a phone or call.Â
How can chatbots and artificial intelligence aid the tourism industry?
AI assistants and intelligent chatbots are now taking on the role of agents for travel, by assisting travelers to book flights, rental vehicles, and accommodation on the internet. Chatbots are used through social media websites such as Facebook messenger Skype, WhatsApp as well as Viber to give users an experience that is more customized for booking.