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There are an estimated 17.5 million guestrooms around the world catering to everyone from last-minute business travelers to families enjoying a once-in-a-lifetime vacation. Hotels, motels, and boutique properties offer a world of convenience, luxury, and amenities that customers love to enjoy.
While owning or operating a hotel is a worthwhile investment, you want to find ways to automate as much of your operations as possible so you can spend more time serving guests with their needs. Integrating an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot into a hotel website is a crucial tool for providing these services.
The goal of hotel chatbots is to make it easier than ever to finish the booking process, get questions answered, and answer client needs whenever and wherever they happen to be. With 24/7 availability and modern AI tools to make conversations as human as possible, these are highly valuable integrations into your system.
Let’s look closer at how hotel chatbots work and the many reasons you need one built into your property today!
What is a hotel chatbot?
A hotel chatbot is a software program that attempts to respond to customer inquiries using language as close to humans as possible. These are often referred to as “call and response” programs because they base an answer on a database of resolutions.
For example, if a potential guest has a question about whether your property has a pool and the hours it is open, the conversational AI would respond with something appropriate from a database of verified information like: “Our hotel features an Olympic-sized indoor swimming pool available to guests from 10 am to 9:30 pm every day.”
In addition, most hotel chatbots can be integrated into your hotel’s social media, review website, and other platforms. That way, you have an automated response that improves engagement and solutions at every customer touchpoint.
Take ChatBot for a test drive with a free 14-day trial.
What are the ten benefits of using chatbots in the hotel industry?
Every AI-powered chatbot will be different based on the unique needs of your property, stakeholders, and target customers. However, you should experience any combination of the following top ten benefits from the technology.
24/7 customer service
You don’t want to lose potential customers and bookings just because a guest in one time zone cannot access your hotel desk after hours. With an automated hotel management and booking chatbot, questions, bookings, and even dinner recommendations can be quickly accessed without human assistance.
Customers are better able to get the last little crumbs of information required to decide on booking with your hotel.
Smoother booking acquisition
You can use modern hotel booking chatbots across all platforms of your digital footprint. Instead of paying fees or additional booking commissions, your hotel reservation chatbot acts as a concierge and booking agent combined into a single service.
This service reduces customers' barriers to finalizing a stay at your hotel, leading to higher occupancy rates and better revenue.
Complete customer support
Booking a hotel can be a long process. Customers may have to include details about their vehicle for the parking lot, any special requests if they have pets or young children, or may wish to make direct bookings for additional services like an on-property restaurant or spa.
Instead of waiting for a hotel booking agent, the hotel chatbot answers all these questions along the way. Whenever a hiccup in the booking process arises, the hotel booking chatbot comes to the rescue so the customer effort and your potential booking are not lost.
Language support
Not everyone staying at your hotel will be from your country. The very nature of a hotel is its attraction to international travelers wishing to visit local area attractions.
With hotel chatbots, you have a streamlined and automated system that can translate queries in real time and then answer in the native language of the customer using its natural language processing and syntax. That is much more cost-effective than hiring a team of translators for your booking staff.
Promotional opportunities
Want to ensure that a bridal suite package or early room services are ordered ahead of time? An automated hotel reservation chatbot allows you to cross-promote and up-sell different hotel amenities and services within conversations.
Instead of awkward sales pitches, these systems can be trained to subtly slip in different promotions or purchasable benefits that increase the value of each booking. Using AI chatbots in business is essential to growth, and you can read more about this in our comprehensive guide.
Personalization
Many hotels rely on loyalty clubs or travel point systems. This data is crucial for personalizing the guest experience during their stay and when gathering information about your property.
If a family purchased a cot upgrade for their 11-year-old at last year’s stay, an automated hotel chatbot can suggest that same experience and even ask how their now 12-year-old is doing. With 90% of leading marketers reporting personalization as a leading cause for business profitably, it only makes sense to integrate such systems into your resort property.
Boosted customer experience
By their very nature and design, hotel chatbots automate those mundane, repetitive tasks that steal the time of your working professionals. These systems streamline all operations for a smoother, more automated experience that customers appreciate.
Not everyone is planning out their vacation months in advance. Sometimes, guests want a last-minute solution because of unforeseen plans. Having as smooth and efficient a booking process as possible feels rewarding to these customers and will boost your word-of-mouth marketing and retention rates.
Reduced need for human assets
To be clear, this benefit doesn’t mean you fire staff members. Automating hotel tasks allows you to direct human assets to more crucial business operations. Instead of wasting hours trying to flush out an FAQ or field the same questions over and over again, they can focus time on improving amenities and guest satisfaction, upselling different products, or attracting more leads.
Answer repetitive questions 24/7 with our FAQ template.
Upcoming events
A hotel isn’t just for staying the night. Many properties include meeting spaces, event services, and even afternoon pool parties for children’s birthday parties. With all that activity, you may have seasonal promotions, local partnerships, and other things you need to advertise.
Using an automated hotel booking engine or chatbot allows you to engage with customers about any latest news or promotions that may be forgotten in human interaction. This can then be personalized based on the demographics and previous client interactions.
Powerful guest relationships
Your relationship with your guests is crucial to building a long book of return and referral clients. AI-powered chatbots allow you to gather feedback about your services while encouraging more positive reviews on popular sites like Google, Facebook, Yelp, and Tripadvisor.
The goal is to build stronger relationships so your hotel is remembered whenever a customer is in your area or needs to recommend a property to friends.
What metrics should you use to determine the success of a hotel chatbot?
How you judge different hotel chatbots against others is crucial in your decision-making. You want a solution that balances out the needs of your team, your guests (and their preferences), and your stakeholders. This balance is a challenge.
One way to know if you have a robust and reliable automated chatbot is to measure the results from different metrics across your business operations. This may include:
- Bounce rate: This measures how often customers land on your website and then “bounce” away to another competitor. The lower your bounce rate, the more effective the AI chatbot engages your target audience with interest in amenities and services.
- Bookings: Of course, you should see an increase in bookings once the hotel chatbot has been integrated into your systems.
- Engagement: The number of conversations and the depth of successfully resolved queries is a good measure of chatbot-to-customer engagement. Guests should be able to gather the information needed to complete a booking.
- Feedback/reviews: After utilizing hospitality chatbots, look at your various review websites. You should see more positive feedback as the chatbot’s responses are refined over time.
- Customer satisfaction: Anyone running or owning a hospitality business knows customer satisfaction is vital to success. How well your hotel chatbot meets customers' needs and expectations enhances word-of-mouth marketing and experiences.
- Number of bot sessions: The number of chatbot sessions is an often-overlooked metric. You should see an initial increase in interactions and a baseline corresponding to the number of bookings, representing a healthy chatbot interaction with customers.
You’ll most likely have more metrics you can track, like social media followers, website visits, and PPC ad effectiveness. Still, the metrics mentioned above will give you a good idea of the overall capabilities of your hotel chatbot. This will allow you to track ROI and inform stakeholders of the positive news that you are reaching goals and KPIs more effectively.
How to choose the best hotel chatbot
The best hotel chatbot you use will significantly depend on your team's preferences, your stakeholders' goals, and your guests' needs. You want a solution that brings as many benefits as possible without sacrificing the unique competitive advantage you’ve relied on for years.
Most importantly, your chatbot automation should be easy to onboard and simple for your staff to maintain and update whenever necessary. If you have a local promotion for the holidays coming up, it shouldn’t take two weeks and a team of IT professionals to integrate that news into your hotel website.
Finally, whatever you choose should have robust support. Not every hotel owner or operator has a computer science degree and may not understand the ins and outs of hotel chatbots. An easy-to-use and helpful customer support system should be included in your purchase.
If you need more guidance, look for hotel chatbots that can integrate with your legacy systems, offer AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities, and can be customized to fit the needs of your property and guests.
Crucial features of a hotel chatbot
With the hotel and hospitality industry evolving rapidly, you want the features you know will give you the most competitive advantages. At the very least, look for a hotel chatbot that:
- Has an easy-to-use user interface or “dashboard.”
- Works as an FAQ service for building a robust customer support page.
- Integrates with your booking engines, social media, and PMS systems.
- Includes the ability to customize and personalize the chatbot for your customers.
- Has both AI and ML support to “learn” as customers use the system.
- Comes with multi-language support.
- Equipped with check-in and check-out functionality (includes early/late options).
- Can function as a concierge of sorts, making recommendations where appropriate.
- Provides plenty of analytics for your decision-making.
Most of all, you want multi-channel functionality. Whether you’re choosing a rule-based hotel bot or an AI-based hotel chatbot, it should work across any customer touchpoint you already use.
How do hotel chatbots work?
The primary way any chatbot works for a hotel or car rental agency is through a “call and response” system. The hotel chatbots receive user queries or interactions via text or voice. The chatbot then interprets that information to the best of its ability so the responses it provides are as relevant and helpful as possible.
There are two primary forms of hotel chatbots you’ll want to explore for your particular needs. These are:
- Rule-based chatbots: In this form, you create “built-in” databases of information that the chatbot uses to respond to customer inquiries. It looks for key phrases or words and then uses internal logic to provide a response.
- AI-based chatbots: Using AI and ML tools, these chatbots can better interpret inputs and then generate responses that sound as close to human syntax as possible. That allows the system to learn over time and address an ever-growing range of questions in multiple languages.
How to implement a hotel chatbot on your website
Your hotel website is where you want your hotel chatbot to operate. This is ground zero for lead generation and will likely be where you receive the most customer inquiries.
Many hotel chatbots on the market require specialized help to integrate the service into your website. This may include customized plugins, add-ons, or extensions. In others, such as ChatBot, there are no third-party providers like OpenAI, Google Bard, or Bing AI. This allows everything to be hosted in the cloud – making website integration incredibly easy.
You can follow a simple online tutorial and have your hotel chatbot working in no time. However, don’t forget to consider adjusting your hotel chatbot for FAQ pages, seasonal promotions, email support, and a ton of other ways.
Take ChatBot for a test drive with a free 14-day trial.
How can hotel chatbots improve customer experience?
There are many ways AI chatbots help customers. We’ve already provided the top ten benefits demonstrating how these systems can improve the overall customer experience.
However, the most important is ensuring your guests always feel valued and well-cared for during their interactions and stays with your property.
You are in the hospitality business. People are more willing to pay higher prices or stay longer when treated with respect and dignity. That little extra “oomph” of support and personalized care goes a long way to cultivating a memorable experience shared online and off.
Hotel chatbot examples
There are many examples of hotels across the gamut of the hotel industry, from single-night motels in the Phoenix, Arizona desert to 5-star legendary stays in metropolitan cities. For example, The Titanic Hotels chain includes the 5-star Titanic Mardan Palace in Turkey. This uses the Asksuite hotel chatbot for improved bookings and FAQ pages.
If you want to stay in the middle of Old London City in the UK, you may visit the Leonardo Royal Hotel London, which utilizes the HiJiffy hotel chatbot.
The point is the list goes on and on. Integrating hotel chatbots into your current systems is the best way to improve the customer experience and a crucial step in ensuring you maintain a competitive advantage over your peer properties. It helps you stand out in a saturated market and provides a real-world solution to higher occupancy rates.
Hotel chatbot tools
Of the many tools found online, like Asksuite, HiJiffy, Easyway, and Myma.ai, one stands out for its incredible support and ease of integration – ChatBot. This streamlined hotel chatbot offers quick and accurate AI-generated answers to any customer inquiry.
Using a no-code chatbot setup, your hospitality team can simply drag and drop their way into faster 24/7 support for any customer need. With a vibrant data security process and offsite hosting, you ensure your property has a comprehensive solution for better customer service processes, interactions, and lead conversion rates.
Visit ChatBot today to sign up for free and explore how you can boost your hotel operations with a single powerful tool.
Improve your booking process with ChatBot
Guest messaging software may seem like a pipedream of technology from the future, but almost every competitive property already uses these tools. To keep your hospitality business at the head of the pack, you need an automated system like a hotel chatbot to ensure quality customer service processes.
Explore all that hotel chatbots can do for your business. This is the best way to future-proof your hotel from the ever-changing whims of the economy and consumer marketplace.
Take ChatBot for a test drive with a free 14-day trial.
