Hospitality chatbot

The article “Top 14 Hospitality Chatbots to Consider in 2023” by HotelTechReport offers a thorough assessment of the top chatbots for the hospitality industry in 2023. The article outlines the main characteristics and advantages of each chatbot, as well as the hospitality industries and clientele groups they are most appropriate for.

The ideal hospitality chatbot for a company would depend on the needs and specifications of that company. The 14 chatbots highlighted in the article, however, are all fantastic choices for hospitality organisations of various sizes wishing to use AI chatbots to enhance their customer experience.

Services for consumers that are highly personalised are the foundation of the hotel sector. Customer experience is important for both hotels and travel agencies. Customers in the hospitality industry now spend more time online than they do offline, researching options and making reservations. In the hospitality sector, chatbots can serve as information centres. Additionally, an AI chatbot can make reservations, plan appointments, and even design unique itineraries!

What are hospitality chatbots?

AI-powered virtual assistants called hospitality chatbots are used in the hospitality sector to improve the client experience. These chatbots communicate with visitors and offer them information, support, and services while they are staying at hotels, resorts, restaurants, or other hospitality establishments using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques.  Hospitality chatbots are computer programs that simulate conversations with real clients in the hospitality sector by using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. They can be used on many platforms, such as websites, social media, and messaging applications.

Why should you use hospitality chatbots?

There are many reasons why you should use customer service chatbots.

• By rapidly automating customer requests, hotel chatbots enhance customer service workers. They allow personnel to concentrate on other crucial activities, including offering guests greater service, by doing this.
•  Due to the fact that guests may contact hotels from all possible time zones, response times can be very important in the hospitality industry. Hotel chatbots can help to solve this issue because they work nonstop. As a result, hotel chatbots may offer customer care around the clock.
• Instant translation is now possible, especially with AI chatbots, enabling consumers to get responses to particular questions in the language of their choice, regardless of the language they speak. The chatbot can aid in establishing trust by speaking to visitors in their own language.

Top 14 Hospitality Chatbots for Hospitality Industry In 2023

1. Chatbot.team

India’s top platform for building no-code chatbots, Chatbot.team, aids companies in automating their sales and customer service procedures. It enables the ability to target and segment audiences precisely, redefining customer engagement and creating more individualized experiences. Our chatbot solutions boost your communication strategy by enabling you to create tailored messages that genuinely resonate with your audience. It delivers individualized offers, suggestions, and content that resonates to increase engagement, trust, and conversions for your company. With features like chatbots powered by AI, customization choices, integrations, NLP, analytics, multi-platform support, and 24/7 accessibility, it gives your business a boost.

Features of Chatbot.team

The platform provided by Chatbot.team has a number of features that make it simple to construct chatbots, such as:

• Platform without coding: Chatbot.team’s platform is made to be simple to use, even for companies without coding expertise.
• Scalable and adaptable: Chatbot.team’s platform is made to be flexible, enabling companies to build chatbots that are tailored to their particular requirements.
• A drag-and-drop interface, a library of pre-built chatbot components, and a visual editor for designing chatbot flows are just a few of the many features that make it simple to create chatbots on the Chatbot.team platform.
• Reliable and secure: Businesses can have faith that their chatbots will be available when they’re needed thanks to Chatbot.team’s platform.
• Services from Chatbot.team are reasonably priced, making them a fantastic choice for companies of all sizes.

Limitations

• Limited features
• No Free Plan
• High learning curve
• Not as customizable

Pricing Plans of Chatbot.team

This chatbot offers three plans for its users, who can select the plan according to the needs of their business.

• Free Plan: It works for a period of 14 days.
• Premium Plan: Its price is ₹ 6500/ month.
• Enterprise Plan: Its price varies with the features added. Contact the sales team for further details.

2. Asksuite

Features

• Omnichannel Inbox for Hotels: It manages travellers’ inbound chats, emails, and social media messages from a centralized inbox and takes control of metrics and sales performance.
• AI Reservation Agent: It never loses sales and reservations due to service issues by automating replies to repetitive questions with an AI-powered chatbot available 24/7 on main communication channels.
• Inbound Reservation CRM: It understands the booking journey on every service channel. It manages all touchpoints and boosts agents’ direct booking conversion rate with dozens of productivity-enhancing features.

Price

The pricing details are available with the sales team.

3. Quicktext

Quicktext is a cloud-based hotel chatbot platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to provide 24/7 customer service to hotel guests. It can be integrated with a hotel’s property management system (PMS) and website to provide guests with a seamless experience.

Features

• Quicktext structures and shares over 1,500 data points for each hotel which in turn supplies responses for artificial intelligence, optimises online marketing strategy, and dynamically generates content.
• The virtual assistant, Velma, is equipped with 3rd generation AI and is available 24/7 in 30 languages which enables hotels to increase their income, boost their team’s productivity and improve customer satisfaction.
• Quicktext anonymises, centralises and indexes all the data produced during conversations between Velma and customers which enables optimisation of the hotel’s commercial, marketing and help desk operations.

Price

For the details of pricing, the sales team must be contacted.

4. Hijiffy

An AI-powered communications platform called HiJiffy was created to assist hotels in boosting direct reservations and enhancing customer service. The HiJiffy solution integrates cutting-edge technology in a straightforward, dependable, and robust platform to centralise, automate, and measure all customer service activities for hotels. This enables hoteliers to provide better, quicker, and more affordable service to their customers.

Features

• HiJiffy is an automatized messenger concierge service for the hospitality sector. The automatization is built within Facebook Messenger with artificial intelligence.
• It provides instant answers in 130+ languages to the guests on their favourite social media and messaging apps.
• It boosts direct bookings and increases revenue by automating the processes.

Pricing

Detailed pricing is available with the sales team.

6. Easyway

Easyway is a chatbot-enabled service platform that runs in the cloud and has a number of other capabilities. The Easyway chatbot is a potent AI chatbot that may be employed to respond to client inquiries, handle problems, and offer help. It may be integrated with a number of customer care platforms, such as messaging apps, helpdesk software, and CRM systems.

Features

• Its generative AI Agents for guest communication create conversational experiences that make them happy.
• Online registration for check-in & check-out enables the guests to experience silky smooth check-in and check-out experiences.
• Personalized guest portal for guest directory and upselling directs the guests to the hotel’s guest portal to share the hotel amenities and services.
• Guest behavioural insights and analytics provide behavioural patterns and outstanding service to increase revenue.

Price

The pricing is available with the sales team.

7. Book Me Bob

It is an  artificial intelligence chatbot developed by hotels for hoteliers. Book Me Bob can be used to schedule appointments, reservations, and services. Numerous scheduling platforms, including calendars, booking platforms, and CRM systems, can be combined with it.

Features

• It is available throughout the guest lifecycle from Pre-Booking, Arrival, In-Stay, and post-stay
• It works for hotels, resorts, homestays and restaurants as well.
• It is available on Websites, apps, mobile phones etc.
• It answers questions of your website visitors and converts them to bookers.

Pricing

The starter plan starts at $69. Further price details are available with the sales team.

8. Akia

Akia is a text messaging platform for hotels to communicate with guests, streamlines hotel operations and provides SMS marketing for hoteliers.

Features

• It remotely captures IDs, signatures, and security deposits in advance. It’s an important tool for streamlining the check-in process and when done remotely and digitally, it can expedite the registration process and minimize wait times at the front desk.
• The arrival Guide showcases the neighbourhood and provides instructions and directions to ensure a seamless arrival. An arrival guide can educate guests about specific rules or policies of the property, such as noise restrictions, pet policies, or smoking guidelines. This helps prevent potential conflicts during the stay.
• Food Menus Easily maintain room service offerings by digitizing your menu. Akia’s Mini Apps allow hotels to replace paper menus with digital counterparts accessible through their guests’ mobile devices.

Pricing

The bronze plan is the starter plan. The pricing details are available with the sales team.

9. Bookboost AB

Bookboost Hospitality Engagement Platform helps hotels improve guest relationships, increase marketing effectiveness and simplify processes with a modern multi-channel CRM and best-in-class Unified Inbox.  It is a strategic & customer experience solution where you can build meaningful relationships with the customer.

Features

• By automating repetitive tasks, it frees up the time for your employees to focus on important tasks.
• It helps to communicate personally with the guests by connecting all communication channels and using the guest data.
• It defines and segments target audiences based on their preferences, enabling better opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling.
• By having all the tools in one place and the right workflows, the staff will achieve better results.

Pricing

The plans include a Customer Data Platform, integration with PMS and the reporting tool. For further details, the sales team must be contacted.

10. HelloShift

HelloShift is modern messaging for hotels – staff collaboration, guest messaging, and website chat in one winning app. HelloShift is the only guest messaging solution that comes with staff collaboration included in the same app. This means that when guest messages come in with questions and requests, teams can work together across buildings, floors, shifts, and departments to deliver.

Features

• It is an easy-to-use and excellent coordination tool between the hotel staff and the guests. There is no requirement for specific training for the staff to switch to HelloShift.
• HelloShift makes it easy for hotels to communicate with guests via text/SMS. HelloShift integrates with the PMS and automatically sends helpful texts at key points in the guest lifecycle, such as before check-in.
• HelloShift makes it easy for guests to skip the Front Desk via Contactless check-in. Guests can check in on their mobile devices, scan and upload documents, digitally sign registration cards, receive mobile keys, and have access to all hotel amenities through a guidebook that is customized with the hotel brand.

Pricing

Its starter plan begins at $49 per month. More details are available with the sales team.

11. DialogShift GmbH

Hotels of all sizes rely on DialogShift’s Generative AI to automatically respond to recurring guest queries, improve availability and service for guests, and generate more direct bookings.

Features

• It makes the hotel approachable and available to your guests along the entire guest journey, right where they are: from Google search to check-out.
• It offers trained German and English AI language models for the hotel industry and provides automated rates far above the industry average.
• It focuses on dialogue marketing and conversion and translates the experience from millions of conversations into intelligent dialogue management.
• It supports workflows from the call centre sector like skill-based message routing, freely definable message queues and central team collaboration.

Pricing

It has customised pricing details which are available to the sales team.

12. Sojern

A prominent digital marketing tool designed specifically for the travel industry is Sojern. Sojern offers multi-channel marketing solutions to increase direct demand. These solutions are powered by artificial intelligence and traveller intent data. Every year, Sojern helps 10,000 hotels, attractions, tourism boards, and travel marketers engage and convert tourists from all over the world.

Features

• It provides an unrivalled traveller insight by helping with data enrichment, customer segmentation and profiling, audience building
• It provides an easy-to-use multichannel tool with a built-in strategy of reach and activation.

Pricing

The details of the price are available to the sales team.

13. Ochatbot

Ochatbot is a Free AI chatbot for eCommerce, support and lead generation. It has advanced eCommerce features with abandoned cart, order status, adding to cart inside the chat window and more. It automatically connects to all e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, and Woocommerce. It includes live chat handles support questions and connects to CRMs and ticketing platforms.

Features

• Easily installed with one script on your website
• Build simple or complex conversational logic trees
• Engage users at the right time to start a conversation using a variety of triggers
• Gain insights from user data
• Build, test and launch your chatbot for free

Pricing

It has a free plan for start-ups, The details of pricing are available with the sales team.

14. Bebot

Bebot acts as a hotel concierge to help personalize guest experiences.  It is designed to empower guests through instant, real-time assistance such as exclusive recommendations for both popular and little-known sights in the area, answering questions and making restaurant bookings.

Features

• It provides guests with personal assistance such as booking restaurants, personalized recommendations for activities, and answering questions about hotel facilities and services.
• Bebot is easy to customize for any size hotel in any location through its intuitive administrative interface.

Pricing

The sales team can be contacted for detailed pricing.

How To Choose the Best Hospitality Chatbot?

Choosing a hospitality chatbot involves careful consideration of your business goals, customer needs, technical capabilities, and available resources. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you choose the right hospitality chatbot for your organization:

Define Your Objectives:

We must understand why we need a hospitality chatbot. We must know what we want to achieve with the chatbot. Clear goals will guide our selection in increasing hotel service, increasing engagement, providing business-related advice, or streamlining related operations, clear objectives will guide our selection. We must analyze our guests’ preferences and problem points and what are the most common queries they have. We also need to identify areas where a chatbot can provide value and enhance their experience.

Choose the Platform:

Depending on our requirements and budget, we must choose the appropriate type. There are rule-based chatbots and AI-powered chatbots. Rule-based chatbots follow predefined rules, while AI-powered chatbots use machine learning to understand and respond to user queries more dynamically.

Choose the chatbot type:

The decision between rule-based and AI-powered chatbots is influenced by your specific business requirements, money, technological competence, and the level of complexity you demand in your chatbot’s interactions.  Rule-based chatbots operate based on predefined rules and triggers, suitable for handling simple tasks, quickly addressing FAQs, and providing basic information. They follow programmed dialogues and lack contextual understanding. These chatbots are easy to set up and maintain, making them effective for straightforward interactions and predictable user requests.  AI-powered chatbots offer enhanced user experiences by delivering personalized and human-like interactions. While rule-based chatbots have a lower initial setup cost, AI-powered chatbots offer a higher long-term return on investment due to their advanced capabilities. AI-powered chatbots are better equipped for scalability as business needs evolve, but their development and training demand more time and resources.

Finally, if our hotel requires simple interactions and has a minimal budget, a rule-based chatbot may be appropriate. An AI-powered chatbot, on the other hand, is a preferable solution if you want to provide sophisticated, personalised, and dynamic interactions that can adapt to user preferences over time. When making your decision, keep your specific use cases and future scalability requirements in mind.

Discuss the Design and Development Process:

A chatbot’s design and development process includes numerous stages, from conceptualization through deployment. Developing a successful chatbot involves several key phases: defining objectives and tasks, selecting the appropriate chatbot type and platform, designing a user-friendly experience, training AI capabilities, gathering and refining data, creating on-brand content, rigorous testing, deployment, monitoring performance, continuous improvement based on user feedback, ongoing maintenance, security compliance, and user education. Each step contributes to a well-rounded and effective chatbot implementation.

See Available Integration Options:

 Chatbot integration means you are connecting the chatbot with various platforms. It’s an entire process to deploy the chatbot on various social platforms and applications. Depending on your hotel service goals and target audience, you can choose the most appropriate integration options. Here are some common chatbot integration options:

• Website Integration: Embed the chatbot directly on your hotel website using a chat window or widget. It offers real-time assistance to users browsing your site, answering their questions, and providing support.
• Messaging Platforms: Integrating your chatbot with messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp and engaging with users on platforms they are already familiar with, thereby expanding your reach.
• Social Media: Connect your chatbot to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram and engage with users who interact with your brand on social media and provide instant responses.

Test and Launch Your Chatbot:

Testing verifies the functionality, usability, and performance of the chatbot. Usability, functionality, performance, and security are assessed, with user feedback and incorporated. These processes ensure the chatbot operates smoothly, provides accurate responses, and offers a positive user experience. Once successfully integrated and tested, the chatbot is ready for deployment.

What are the Future Trends in Hospitality Chatbots?

Since their inception as a basic messaging tool for the hospitality industry, chatbots have advanced significantly. Technology advancements have made it possible for chatbots to communicate with customers in more sophisticated and flexible ways. The following developments and inventions are influencing the development of chatbots in the future:

• Cloud-based PMS: The cloud hotel PMS is a piece of software that consists of various components and features to automate every task in your hotel. Cloud communications give hotels the ability to enhance back-office productivity while incurring minimal technology acquisition costs, whether it be for handling reservations, front desk, housekeeping, billing, or anything else.
• AI Chatbots: Since artificial intelligence has made significant strides, hotels are opting for innovative digital guest engagement strategies, freeing up hotel staff to focus on duties that will enhance guests’ stays with individualised, high-touch services.
• IoT or the internet of things. It allows various gadgets to link to the internet and be controlled by one centralised device, like a phone or tablet. As a result, these previously non-intelligent devices become “smart” devices that can gather data and engage with one another online.
• virtual reality (VR) is a trend taking over every industry. According to projections, the worldwide virtual reality industry will increase at a CAGR of 45.2% from $16.67 billion in 2022 to $227.34 billion by 2029. Businesses and hotels can offer potential clients first-person digital tours of their vicinity using virtual reality (VR) technology. This is especially relevant when customers are ready to make a reservation because it provides prospective clients with a much better idea of what to anticipate when they visit.

Conclusion

Hospitality chatbots are a useful resource for firms in the sector. They can enhance sales, lower costs, boost customer happiness, and offer round-the-clock service. It’s critical to take into account your company’s unique needs and specifications when selecting a chatbot for the hospitality industry. The 14 chatbots that are included in the article are all great choices, though.