Take 3 minutes to understand how hotel chatbots help you increase your hotel revenues.
If you’re wondering how you can grow RevPAR with a hotel chatbot, here’s how. Hotel chatbots allow you to improve the 2 variables that influence your RevPAR: average price (ADR) and occupancy rate. (RevPAR = ADR * occupancy rate)
Enhance sales with a hotel chatbot
Chatbots are first and foremost a direct sales machine for your hotel. As a Fastbooking study indicates, your website lets most of your customers escape without buying. Out of 100 unique visitors who visit your site, only 9 enter your booking engine and 2 end up booking a room.
There are 10,000 reasons why. Generally speaking, your site is a fishing net that lets too many fish escape. So, it is urgent to tighten its mesh. This is where a chatbot is very useful.
Your website is much less intuitive than you think. If customers do not find the information they want immediately, they will most probably go somewhere else. Hotel chatbots help you engage customers that would otherwise have left your page, by giving them a relevant and instant answer.
Ijlal Jarid, GM of Hotel La Nouvelle République, Paris, once asked me how I could be sure that a chatbot actually generated additional bookings and wasn’t merely diverting traffic from her booking engine towards our hotel chatbot. The answer is simple.
To start a conversation, you can directly click on a chatbot like Quicktext. Or, the chatbot can ask for the customer’s name and email or phone number. By asking the customer for a little more information, you create a small barrier to entry. In doing so, you screen clients who have a real need. These are clients who are unable to obtain the information they need through any way other than the chatbot.
During the conversation with the bot, a customer is sure to get an answer. However, he will also share information about his trip: dates of stay, number of travelers, etc. Of course, the Hotel chatbot will also retrieve all the contact details.
When a customer interacts with the ai chatbot, one of two things could occur:
Case 1: The chatbot answers the customer’s doubts and puts him back on the path to booking direct.
Case 2: The chatbot needs the help of a team member and notifies the hotel staff.
In any case, your chatbot provides you with a summary of all the booking requests it receives in the form of an email and a report. This way you can track conversions and follow-up with customers who did not finish their direct booking.
According to Angela, head of customer relations for the Les Maisons de Georges Hotel Group, We are pleasantly surprised with Zalia’s ROI for Le Six Paris. Between 20% and 25% of requests were converted into reservations. This analysis was made between January and May 2019. In addition, on all the unfinished reservations, we were able to see good conversion, thanks to the follow-up emails made by our teams.
Increase your average price with a hotel chatbot
According to a study conducted on a sample of 100 hotels between January and June 2019, the average value of Quicktext chatbot bookings is higher than the average hotel price.
The chatbot’s ability to handle complex requests that sometimes escape the hotel’s booking engine can explain this. Such is the case with this Parisian hotel whose name I have changed.
If you’d like to discuss more about how you can grow RevPAR with a hotel chatbot, or have any questions about AI for the hotel industry, visit our website or contact Benjamin Devisme.
