Technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and big data analytics are impacting and reshaping the hospitality industry.
Artificial intelligence in the hospitality industry allow hotels to become more customer-centric and to automate various operations like hotel reservation, query support, payments, MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conferencing, Exhibitions) lead qualification, etc…
What is a Hotel Virtual Assistant ?
An AI-powered Hotel virtual assistant, also called AI assistant or intelligent personal assistant is an application program that understands customer queries and intent and provides instant 24/7 support in an interactive way.
The first generations of virtual assistants were the typical call center vocal server that could only answer mechanical commands without any kind of artificial intelligence.
Current virtual assistants are largely benefiting from the advances of artificial intelligence. Also known as intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) and virtual agents, they upgrade the traditional virtual assistant experience to make it more advanced and personalized than ever before. Most people nowadays have interacted with this kind of technology if they have ever used Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri.
What can virtual assistants do for the hospitality industry?
The Hotel virtual agent (Hotel Virtual Assistant) offers tourism and hotel industry the opportunity to stay in constant contact with guests, but also allows staff to automate repetitive and tedious tasks. Using a fast and available virtual agent is more efficient for the satisfaction and the development of customer loyalty as well as for the optimization of the customer experience.
Virtual assistants centralize all messaging platforms
The Hotel virtual assistant handles more than 85% of customer queries and delivers instant support 24/7 on various messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, the hotel website, Google My Business Chat, etc., with all messages centralized in one platform.
We are living in the social media era, so customers prefer to use social media (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.) to contact the hotel. That’s way it is so necessary to connect a chatbot to hotels’ social media as it is beneficial both for hotels and guests.
Now let’s look at Google My Business Messaging, which is an emerging direct sales channel that hotels should be paying special attention to.
Business Messages is a mobile conversational channel that people can access on Search or Google Maps that allows hotels to deliver engaging messaging experiences with customers and drive direct bookings.
Hotels can increase sales by engaging customers directly from Google My Business messaging feature.
Google My Business Messages is a communication platform, allowing hotels to be available and offer value throughout the customer’s journey. From discovery, connecting consumers to the information they need, to purchase and support.
Businesses Messages provide hotels with a scalable way to harness customer’s moment of need right from Google Search, Maps, and even from a brand’s owned channels. It’s a bot-led experience that leverages the best of Google’s automation capabilities.
Consumers today prefer to connect with hotels using messaging. So, whether your customers are looking to learn about your hotel, buy something, or get help with anything else, Business Messages allows your business to offer them instant support.
Virtual Assistants help hotels improve Customer Service
AI virtual assistants (chatbots) help your team filter requests and deliver automated and instant answers. When it comes to efficiency, time is of the essence.
Only customer conversations that require attention are forwarded to staff to immediately detect and resolve important issues that might otherwise have been lost in the flow of requests that your hotel gets every day.
Customer service virtual assistants help you to save time, cost, and effort. Most of FAQs and routine queries you get daily by mail or phone can be solved with AI-powered hotel chatbots replacing a huge team of human representatives taking care of the same questions over and over 24/7.
Also, Customer service virtual assistants can serve customers from all over the world as they can speak multiple languages.
Virtual Assistants help hotels increase direct bookings
If you want to increase Hotel direct bookings, keep in mind that small improvements add up over time. So don’t be discouraged if you don’t see results overnight. Every 1% increase in direct sales is a victory to celebrate! Ultimately, you can rely less and less on OTAs, metasearch, guest engagement, and follow-up to secure conversion.
For more details: Hotel direct booking strategies
You can make reservations and other appointments using an AI chatbot for hotels, which is an excellent tool for appointment scheduling. AI can help your hotel increase effeciency and drive digital transformation.
This feature is so important for the hospitality industry as it will make the process easier and well arranged, so booking revenue would increase if hoteliers used it.
Virtual Assistants optimize hotel marketing and conversion
Big companies nowadays spend massive amounts on developing their marketing systems, now it is so important to use technology to improve your hotel’s profits and revive the hospitality industry.
A robust Artificial Intelligence or AI-powered virtual assistant for hotels can supercharge your lead conversion process and optimize the performance of your marketing and sales teams. AI virtual assistants (digital assistants) can help sales and marketing teams in the hospitality industry to guide leads through the direct booking pipeline.
The AI virtual assistant does the hard work for your marketing team by collecting data about your customers, following up with your leads through automated emails, and re-engaging with them to ensure conversions.
Use Hotel Virtual Assistant as an Avatar
On 28 October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook is now Meta. This announcement thrust this general concept into the limelight. In this paragraph, we will discuss the impact of Metaverse regarding virtual assistants.
Virtual assistants in the Metaverse will be represented by an Avatar to interact with the customer. The experience will be fantastic, it is all about immersive experiences, hotel avatars or virtual assistants will need to develop lifelike expressions, emotions, lip-syncing, etc.
Quicktext offers AI technologies dedicated to the hospitality industry for the Metaverse. Velma is used as an Avatar in the Metaverse, not just a chatbot for hotels.
Quicktext Chatbots and Virtual Assistant
Quicktext provides Velma AI chatbot which is implementing Natural Language Understanding (NLU) that can be considered as a subset of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and is a critical part of success in processing data. NLU is primarily focused on machine reading comprehension.
Quicktext provides all the above-mentioned features adapted to hospitality use cases. Velma AI chatbot helps hotels increase their direct booking.
Velma AI chatbot centralizes the main instance messaging channels that may be used to communicate between hotels and guests in one place, such as web chat + Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp chat.
Velma reduces staff workload by instantly handling frequent inquiries and interactions such as time of check-in, airport transfer, parking, Room view, Swimming pool, etc.
Quicktext virtual assistants improve operational efficiency and increase online direct revenues of the hospitality industry by 11% on average.
You can read this article to gain more information about chatbots and conversational AI in the hospitality industry : https://www.quicktext.im/blog/conversational-ai-in-the-hospitality-industry/
Abstract
Virtual assistants in the Hospitality Industry provide solutions to a lot of hotels around the world. This sector has been suffering due to the travel restrictions which limited the number of potential guests. The aforementioned features are able to reduce the effect of the COVID19 pandemic restrictions and make the operation of the hospitality industry better and easier.
