If you’re in the travel industry, you know better than anyone how much has changed over the past few years. The Covid-19 pandemic undeniably changed travel forever. Once people began to travel agin, they had become accustomed to accelerated digitalization and increased booking flexibility. And as travel continues to rebound — with global leisure travel up 31% in March 2023 — customer expectations continue to rise.
Immediately post-pandemic, according to McKinsey and Skift Research, negative sentiment was on the rise. But travelers were willing to overlook customer service issues. Likely because they were excited to be able to travel at all.
But in a post-ChatGPT world, where customers have seen what generative AI is capable of, expectations are higher than ever. Travel companies are seeing customer service emerge as a key differentiator. Which means customer loyalty is up for grabs.
Leading travel companies are turning to AI-powered automation to provide fantastic customer experiences and efficient service across channels. Technology like chatbots and virtual agents allow travel companies to scale their support teams without hiring additional agents, take some of the burden off their agents, and get back to their customers faster.
Learn how DiscoverCars saves €128k annually and upskills its agents with generative AI.
See generative AI in action in this demo built for travel companies.
Why travel and customer service automation are the perfect pair
Automated customer service technology like chatbots are ideally suited for travel companies for a number of reasons. Firstly, the travel industry is full of customers asking similar questions over and over, like inquiring about baggage policies or wanting to change the date of a room reservation. These types of inquiries are very easy to automate end-to-end, meaning the customer never even has to interact with a human agent. This allows your support team to focus on the more complicated questions that do require human intervention, and saves time for your customers and saves money for your business.
An example of a baggage inquiry that a travel chatbot can handle without human intervention.
Secondly, travel is inherently an industry that requires 24/7 support in multiple languages. Whether you’re a hotel or an airline or a car rental agency, travelers from all over the world will likely need to contact you at all hours of the day with unexpected changes or questions. Even the simplest chatbots can provide answers to FAQs 24 hours a day. But with advanced generative and conversational AI technology, the best AI chatbots can understand what your customers want and respond intelligently in any language.
What’s more, a great customer support automation platform allows customers to contact you via wherever is convenient for them. So whether it’s easiest for your customers to email your team, start a live chat on your website or DM you on Instagram, your bot can answer inquiries across all digital channels.
Lastly, travel tends to have varying demand — whether that be unforeseeable fluctuations due to things like the pandemic or predictable peak seasons that occur every year. This means that many companies have to hire and train temporary employees or risk overwhelming their current team. Automating the simple, repetitive requests allows customer support teams to instantly scale their team without actually increasing headcount. And best of all, as your business grows, the best AI-powered bots, like Ultimate's platform, will continue to scale with you. This is because the AI can learn from your customer conversations, so it improves and gets more accurate as time goes on.
What can a travel chatbot do?
An AI chatbot for the travel industry has a huge number of possible use cases. First up, you'll want to automate your FAQs with generative AI. These are the kinds of inquiries that are already covered in your help center or FAQ page already. By connecting your help center to a generative AI-powered bot — like our gen AI offering UltimateGPT — you can set up a bot in mere minutes.
Then to increase personalization and automation rates, you can add API integrations. API integrations allow your bot to connect to your backend systems — like your booking system or payment provider — and pull and push information from them. This means that many more complex queries can be completely taken care of by the bot, such as:
- Changing a flight
- Inquiring about a booking status
- Upgrading a room
- Asking what travel documents are needed
- Taking payment
- Booking additional baggage
- And so much more
Just be sure to check that the automation provider you choose has security certifications, like SOC2, to ensure your customer data stays safe.
Of course, not all customer requests can be automated. Here, your bot can act as a first line of defense, asking the customer questions to gather context and passing that information on to an agent so the customer doesn’t have to repeat themselves and their query can be resolved faster.
An example of a complex use case a travel chatbot can handle end-to-end: changing flights and processing any associate costs.
Furthermore, although they are primarily used for customer service, chatbots can make a difference to your business’s bottom line with upselling or cross-selling opportunities. For example, if a customer is already engaged in a chat or email thread with a bot to change their flight, your bot could prompt them to upgrade to business class or add an extra piece of luggage. Additionally, Ultimate’s customer, Finnish tour operator Aurinkomatkat finds that chat customers tend to be more qualified leads,
“Chat conversations also lead to a sale much more often than calls because most people are already at least thinking of buying a trip. So the virtual agent has been working very well for us."
- Olli Vikman, Service Manager, Aurinkomatkat
Read how automation helped tour operator Aurinkomatkat bounce back from Covid-19.
What kinds of travel companies can benefit from customer service automation?
Travel companies of all shapes and sizes can benefit from implementing a chatbot. Whether you’re an online travel agent (OTA), an airline, a tour operator, a car rental agency, a public transportation system or a hotel, chances are you have a high amount of repetitive requests, customers wanting to communicate in many languages, a demand for 24/7 support that your team may not be able to keep up with, and fluctuations in volume of support queries. By automating your customer service, you can ensure your travelers get the information they need and your team stays happy.