In recent years, the travel agency market has taken a big hit. With all the advancements in technology and alterations in consumer behaviour, the traditional reasons one would approach an agency are growing less meaningful every year.
But, after an initial and dramatic halving of the workforce of those employed in the travel agency industry, it seems like the decline in travel agents number has smoothed for now. Indeed, they may be more important now than ever before. Regardless how much one knows about travel, there are times when an agent can make all the difference!
While, nowadays the majority of people, are used to planning trips by themselves, travel agents can offer something that society has started to crave again: personal experience and guidance. There is a growing trend in travel: connecting customers with experts who can help planning one’s dream vacation.
Assembling an experience that a person might not have even pondered as an option. Consumers’ increasingly high demand for personalisation and real-time responses is boosted by the debut of Artificial Intelligence and all the perks associated with it.
Chatbots save you time and reduce your processual workload!
Hotel chatbots can handle your frequently asked questions and save the precious time of customer service representatives. This will enable them to handle more complex customer problems and lay focus on other complex managerial activities.
If your bot is skilled to handle customer problems then this can ease your agencies’ processual workload. It will also save customers’ time that is spent in reaching out to service executives and waiting for the helpline or for the answer to their sent email.
Great channel to provide a better customer care
It is a fact that chatbots are revolutionising customer care, from answering questions to solving customer issues to package recommendations. Travellers are getting younger and more tech-savvy, meaning there is a huge demand for chatbots within the industry.
Chatbots bring competence and efficiency to the organization by providing a 24/7 customer care service. It is even more engaging than human assistants because there are no time boundaries. With so many possibilities come the added benefit of all time availability. This ensures improved customer’s engagement with your brand even more than a mobile app or social media!
Personalisation, personalisation, personalisation!
As a result of this emerging trend, companies are willing to differentiate from competitors and to stay one step ahead in terms of new technologies implementations. This brings us to the increasing role of messaging bots in travel companies’ strategies. That technology is giving excellent results in terms of customers’ experience and creating personalised relationships with clients, as it can remember their tastes or demands.
But above being just simple “search and booking” helpers, chatbots are meant to become complete travel assistants: for example, providing personalised information during the trip. Basically, they should be able to help you book your trip from flights to local accommodation, and also help travellers by suggesting interesting places or events in the area they are staying at, depending on the professional or personal nature of their stay. AI can help provide the perfect tailor-made vacation!
Harmoniously transfer the conversation from the chatbot to a travel agent
Chatbots alone cannot solve each and every problem potential travellers may have, as websites and apps do not too. In chatbots, this can happen due to limitations of NLP technology, but also because from time, to time the bot simply does not have the expected answer. With a chatbot, there is always the possibility of having a travel agent prepared to step into the conversation in a seamless way.
Cost-effective solution
Chatbot’s development is highly cost-effective. With the power of AI, bots are able to solve many customer problems of routine nature. This means you no longer need to outsource to 3rd party customer care centres. Chatbots could help trim business costs by more than $8 billion per year by 2022, according to new research which is anticipating a surge in automated customer service programs as companies move to embrace artificial intelligence (AI).
How can HiJiffy help your Travel Agency?
HiJiffy is a company building a tech-disruptive chatbot solution through Facebook Messenger for the travel industry. We bring cutting-edge technology to people’s lives with the ultimate goal of making the process of booking a vacation as easy as sending a text message.
Our solution empowers travel agencies by improving their client’s engagement and increasing their users’ retainment with an AI-powered travel agent in Facebook Messenger. How does our bot work: we start with a set of your customers’ frequently asked questions. Whenever the bot finds it relevant, it transfers the communication to a travel agent.
On your Facebook Messenger chatbot, your clients can communicate any inquiries, suggestions or complaints and if they want to they can insert all the information necessary to request a quote. In addition, our solution allows you to re-engage with your clients, send them the right message at the right time with our smart notification system.
We have been working with a travel agency and our results are speaking for themselves: we had more than 200 monthly users chatting with the agency and 45% came through the website’s widget.
