Travel chatbots: Top examples that travelers and businesses love

WestJet

WestJet launched Juliet, a Netomi-powered, multilingual AI virtual assistant on chat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Google Assistant. Juliet is the most accurate AI chatbot to date, having fully resolved 74 percent of customer service tickets autonomously without human intervention. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, WestJet saw a 45X spike in customer service calls. Capable of answering hundreds of questions, Juliet deflected tens of thousands of calls from human agents.

Since Juliet launched, customer satisfaction (CSAT) has jumped 24 percent. Without Juliet, the airline would have struggled to scale customer support operations during the challenging time when travelers rushed to cancel trips as the result of rapidly changing travel restrictions and guidelines.

Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas

The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas has a chatbot that is truly unparalleled. Rose, the Resident Mischief-Maker and Digital Concierge, oozes the resort’s secretive and flirty personality and promises: “If you’re looking for trouble, I can hook you up with the best we have to offer.” By sending a text, Rose can help guests make restaurant recommendations and book tables, spa treatments, event tickets, self-guided tours, as well as answer questions about hotel services. This chatbot, trained with over 1,000 threads and unique journeys, makes the list due to a personality that entices guests to engage throughout their stay, thus driving revenue.

According to the president of the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, “[Rose’s] playful personality has wooed hotel guests who booked directly into spending 37 percent more than guests who do not engage with her.”

Megabus

Megabus launched Chuck, an email chatbot, in the wake of the pandemic to help with the surge in tickets coming from travelers looking to reschedule or cancel trips. The agent team was drowning in a spike in volume and ghost contacts, a term referring to when the same customer reaches out on multiple channels for support on a single issue. Within weeks, Megabus launched its Netomi AI-powered email bot to provide immediate responses to the most pressing questions like reservation changes, cancellations and refunds, and lost baggage. The AI behind Chuck is also improving over time and coverage rates are now approaching 80 percent. Megabus agents are now empowered to focus on more complex issues.

Edwardian Hotel

Edwardian Hotels London’s Edward is an SMS AI chatbot that teaches guests about hotel amenities, gives directions and tips, and even helps guests submit complaints. With Edward, the entire guest experience becomes self-service, including selecting rooms, checking in, and paying.

Powered by AI and natural language processing, Edward can understand with high accuracy guests’ needs and assist with more than 1,200 topics, such as packages included, departure time, upgrades, adding amenities, ordering room service, and more. By integrating with back-end systems, the bot syncs incoming requests with the mobile number to identify the individual guest. Within seconds, Edward accesses the customer profile to provide a hyper-personalized experience. If the bot can’t help, it will route the guest to the specific person at the hotel who can. If a request isn’t taken care of efficiently, Edward will route a request all the way to the general manager.

According to Michael Mrini, director of IT for Edwardian Hotels London, “One of the most popular questions Edward gets is, ‘Is breakfast included in my booking?’ Edward will check, and if it’s not included, he will respond with the cost, offer a promo, and add it to the reservation for the guest. Edward can do this much faster than a human needing to look up a reservation.”

Edward is responsible for increasing room service sales by 10–50 percent. The bot has helped more than 30,000 guests from 99 countries speaking 59 different languages, and so far in 2019, has managed 69 percent of all guest requests—saving approximately 95 working days.

WYNN Las Vegas

In over 4,000 rooms, WYNN Las Vegas and Encore Resort added Alexa Echo devices to enable guests to simply speak out loud to get answers to more than 200 questions. According to Alex Robinson Hinkle, vice president of marketing, Wynn Las Vegas, “Our front desk and concierge staff are always available and happy to assist guests personally, but for those who prefer, Alexa is yet another amenity we can offer for their ease and convenience.”

The power of the WYNN Alexa bot is its ability to simplify the guest experience—allowing people to check the weather, call the front desk, order room service, and even control the temperature of the room by talking to Alexa. The bot has some powerful natural language capabilities, too. In the first two months alone, the bot was trained to understand 5,000 different ways a guest might ask for an on-property bar or restaurant. The results of this contactless experience have been incredible, with over 83.7 percent customer satisfaction.