Nowadays tourism has become more and more familiar to everyone. The booming tourism industry has been at the most competitive era ever. If you have a business in this field and are looking for ways to drive sales, save time and stand out from other competitors; then maybe this is the time to consider building a chatbot Messenger for your business!
Chatbot in Tourism
Statista.com said that the U.S. tourism industry and travel contributed over 1.6 trillion U.S dollars in economic activities, supporting 7.9 million U.S. jobs (2017). Meanwhile, no one can deny that tourism is a key factor of the European economy. The industry generated more than 5% of the GDP. In 2019, it generated over $393 billion to the GDP of Southeast Asia.
According to Grand View Research, from 2017 to 2028, the chatbot is such a trend. It will expand its appearance not only in Tourism but also other industries. You may see that, the chatbot market value has significantly increased in recent years, especially in the Travel & Tourism industry. The chart also indicates that in the next several years, chatbots will have a big step to dominate all the industries.
To have a better understanding, you may take a look at the chart below. It shows the
global chatbot market share in percentage in 2020. Clearly, Travel & Tourism gets the second largest share compared to others.
Then, you may wonder what is so great about chatbots?
It is believed that chatbot could get it done 80% of customer requests, such as making recommendations, accepting bookings, showing information, prices, and completing payments (via Stripe, for example). 84% of travelers use online booking and 87% of them interact with a bot have admitted that they have found out the best deal for their accommodation.
24/7 Service
Offering your target customers a 24/7 service regardless of time. This is such a great source of satisfaction. Insteading waiting for working hours to talk with a live agent, your prospects could be served and solve concerns immediately. Bookings and payments are able to be processed with a chatbot. So, a simple and fast experience could increase your chances of converting them into customers.
In case there is something which the bot cannot come up with a suitable response, it could notify operators. Then, you could jump to the conversation and suggest a solution for your chat users. In BotStar, this feature is called the Human Takeover. (If you want to learn more about it, please visit here).
“Once a customer has a personalized experience, they are 44% more likely to become a repeat buyer.” (Econsultancy)
Code-free customization
Chatbots connect to your tech stacks, automate flows/ conversations behind the screen.
As a result, with several simple steps, you are able to set up the majority of chatbot functionalities.
The best way to build a bot for non-technical users is following our Mini-course. Here are 8 lessons which teach people how to build a bot from scratch. Each lesson includes photos and videos showing step by step to set up action blocks and design conversation.
But, if you are in a hurry and really need to work fast and effectively, you should clone a chatbot from here.There are +75 free templates covering various industries. You will find out some samples which are suitable for your business.
Advantages and disadvantages of using travel chatbots
Benefits of using chatbots.
Faster Customer Support
There’s no doubt that chatbots are able to save your team valuable time. Due to the fact that chatbots can be designed to answer simple questions, your staff may focus on the other complex issues that your customers may have.
Available Constantly
One of the best advantages of chatbots is that, unlike humans, bots can reply to customer inquiries around the clock without extra costing. With 24/7 chat capabilities, your bot can be programmed to talk with chat users instantly, without requiring them to call your service team between working hours.
Promote Conversational Marketing
Most people prefer to receive an answer to the question immediately. Rather than having to scroll through a website and find the answer themselves, or fill out a contact form to receive a call or email later.
A chatbot allows customers to engage with your website without requiring a live chat agent to monitor the conversations.
No one can deny that nothing could beat human-to-human interaction, a bot can substitute until a support or salesperson needs to step in. A good example of this are the chatbots provided by BotStar.
At BotStar, you may use the Comment Trigger to support comments on your posts on Facebook page. Other features, such as Campaign or One-Time Notification are always available. So, you could send out information about Flash Sales or New Arrivals easily.
Thankfully, the Facebook ads could be connected to your bot too. Now, you don’t need to worry about the large amount of work whenever running ads. Chatbots will help you handle almost all conversations smoothly. Thanks to that, the sales rate will be increased significantly.
Cons Of Using Chatbots On Your Site Not Understand Natural Language
As far as bots have come, there’s still some drawbacks, especially when it comes to the natural flow of human conversation. As you may guess, it’s not very likely for a bot to know how to respond to slang, misspellings, and sarcasm contents.
This has created a hiccup for chatbot and impedes the quick service your prospects are looking for.
Not Personalized/ Emotive Conversations.
Bots aren’t going to respond to customers with emotions. This is a big detractor for a lot of customers. Especially when experiencing an issue with a product or service, customers always want their frustrations to be met with empathy. If a conversation doesn’t follow a specific path, the bot doesn’t have the ability to improvise and lacks human touch, thus resulting in a negative customer experience.
How to build the competitive advantages for your travel chatbot?
Charactered Chatbot.
You could create a personality for your chatbot. It could be funny or serious bots based on what business you are working on. In this blog, we’ll focus on a travel bot which should be charming and colorful.
By using a lot of emojis, showing many images and .gif, the chatbot could look attractive to travelers. In addition, the tongue of language should be natural, not the normal tongue.
Designed Flow.
It’s very important to have a flow which stimulates chat users to keep chatting and making the purchase. So, the conversation should sound like a sales scenario. It will lead your prospect into a tunnel which turns them to customers.
To avoid a dead-end conversation, you should set up a Fallback block to handle these cases. It would be better if your bot is honest with chat users, for example: “Sorry I don’t understand what you are saying. Please wait for a live agent”; rather than replying with a general answer. It would piss chat users off.
Classify Customers
You know, not all people who chat with you are ready to make the purchase. There are a lot of them just roaming to collect information. So, in these cases, chatbot could get prospects info, such as email or phone number. Your staff could contact them and offer a personal offer according to their demand, later.
It is clear that chatbots could help you to classify customers. Then, you could have a suitable approaching method/ offer to them.
Your turn of building your own chatbot
Now, it’s your turn to take the action of getting a chatbot for yourself. As mentioned before, you could clone a template or build a bot from scratch.
Either way, you should make the bot with characters/ personalities. So, your chat users would find it amusing to chat with your bot. If you need further assistance on this journey, please contact our support at support@botstar.com Or, you could take a look at the Community — where bot lovers share and learn from each other.
