Increasing direct bookings has long been a constant battle for hoteliers. After all, guiding potential clients to your website take money and effort.
NB: This is an article from ReviewPro
Why lose out to OTAs, and pay them in the process if you can keep your business to yourself? But often it is not that simple. Let’s look at how a chatbot with a booking integration can help you improve booking conversions on your website.
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First step – satisfy their need for information
Guests will come to your website researching their stay with many questions before settling on your hotel. Do you accept pets? What amenities will they find? What are your cancellation policies? Implementing a chatbot to answer these simple queries is a first and crucial step. Instead of having to browse and click through endless pages, guests can now quickly and easily find any information they were looking for. With the use of conversational AI technology, guests receive answers to their questions within seconds.
Once your chatbot has provided guests with the hotel information they need and are decided on your establishment for their next trip, you don’t want to run the risk of them leaving and completing their reservation somewhere else. Integrating your chatbot with a booking engine means that your bot can now help and guide your guests into completing their reservation from within that same conversation.
Increase your booking conversions
Those visiting your hotel website show a great interest in staying at your property, they deserve to be treated as hot sales leads. And as the sales expression goes…. Always be closing. Within the same conversation the guest started asking for information, the chatbot can finish the booking process.
Guests will only need to respond to simple questions while the bot does all the heavy work making the process as simple as possible. If the chatbot is AI-powered, the bot is able to pick up essential information from sentences like “I want to book a room for my partner and me”, and skip redundant steps in the booking process. By simplifying the process of booking a room, you can make sure that guests don’t drop off and complete their reservation with you.
Make your website guest-centric
You can make your website user-friendly, but with the help of a well-trained chatbot, you can also create great user experiences. Guests will not have to plow their way through your website on their own. They can immediately be helped by your chatbot. Not only will the conversational way of completing a booking make the experience a whole lot more agreeable but they can now also book a room right from their favorite messaging app, whether that is Facebook Messenger, WeChat, or WhatsApp.
Removing possible blockages during tedious processes while accommodating guests with familiar platforms will make your website appear much more guest-centric.
Increase guest engagement
Booking a hotel room can be an impersonal experience: it is just you by yourself clicking on the right (and sometimes the wrong) buttons. The tone of voice and the natural way of conversing when booking with a chatbot is much more like talking to a travel agent. This personalized experience will help create a better relationship between you and your future guests.
Added to this, if a guest chooses to finish their reservation through one of their favorite messaging apps, you already began a conversation via their phone pre-arrival. They can now reach out to you whenever they feel like it and, at the appropriate times, so can you.
By adding a booking engine integration you can create great user experiences, support great guest experiences, boost guest engagement, and eventually increase your booking conversions.
