The outlook for the summer 2023 travel season is optimistic yet uncertain. According to the travel site Expedia, searches for information on summer flights are up 25% as vacationers look for the best destination for their money. As the industry continues to recalibrate to meet current demand, travelers are likely to not only face higher prices due to increased fuel prices, labor shortages and inflation, but they are still likely to face many of the same issues that have challenged the travel industry for the past few years, including flight delays and cancelations, shifting travel restrictions due to local surges of COVID-19 and other unexpected situations.
Taken together, these factors will strain customer service teams, in which airlines, hotels and others in the travel industry have made significant investments in training and technology upgrades. New policies – waiving change and cancelation fees, enhancing safety measures and issuing refunds and vouchers for delayed flights, among others – have eased some of the inconvenience of travel disruption, but the fact remains that when faced with an issue, fliers will need to contact customer service. To meet these surges in demand, the travel industry can borrow a tactic from retail, which uses conversational commerce to improve the customer experience.
Benefits of Conversational Commerce
Conversational commerce uses messaging platforms, apps and chatbots to interact with customers and facilitate transactions. While a common use case for conversational commerce is to create a personalized and engaging travel experience through tailored recommendations and selling relevant or related products and services, it also can help agents aid travelers facing a disrupted journey.
For example, a traveler whose flight is delayed can use the airline app’s messaging feature to chat with a virtual agent who can help find an alternative flight, book a hotel room, arrange for ground transportation or offer a voucher or refund. The airline’s customer database captures this interaction, including the traveler’s rating of the exchange, to provide travel recommendations in the future.
Conversational commerce enables quick and easy access to customer service, providing travelers instant updates in the event of a new gate or other change, notifications of flight delays and answering queries about connecting flights or other logistics.
Enter the bots
At the core of conversational commerce’s speed and efficiency are AI-enabled platforms that can interact with customers for many routine questions and needs. These AI-enabled apps use natural language processing and understanding to analyze and interpret customer messages and queries and generate relevant responses. Looking at a common travel disruption – a delayed flight – illustrates the level of competence today’s AI-enabled chatbots have in resolving frequently experienced issues.
The 11:47 p.m. flight from SFO to SYD has been delayed due to an incoming storm. A chatbot sends a notification to those booked on the flight as soon as the delay is known, along with the reason and expected duration of the disruption. Due to the late timing, the next window to take off isn’t until the following afternoon. The chatbot could assist travelers in finding and booking a hotel room near the airport and arranging transportation to and from the hotel or offering compensation in the form of a partial refund or voucher for their inconvenience.
While human agents are fully capable of providing the same services, conversational commerce platforms can scale at a moment’s notice, reaching all 300 passengers at the same time, with each instance of the app serving as a traveler’s own agent. This leaves human agents – whether onsite or in a contact center – free to accommodate VIP customers or address those with more complex challenges.
As the summer 2023 travel season approaches, travelers and travel providers alike can benefit from the convenience and flexibility of conversational commerce. Considering that 90% of consumers say they would not return to an airline or hotel brand after a negative experience (unless there was no alternative), conversational commerce can help keep any disruptions under control.
The benefits are clear: For the travel industry, conversational commerce is not only a way to enhance and improve the customer experience but also a way to reduce costs and increase efficiency. For the traveler, these platforms can keep them apprised of any changes to the itinerary, assist in booking alternate arrangements and provide personalized recommendations for engaging experiences once they arrive at their destination.
