Quicktext hotel virtual assistant, Velma, now displays Mirai’s loyalty rate to customers instead of the BAR (Best Available Rate) to convey the benefits of booking direct to hesitant customers and price sensitive customers.
In 2020, Mirai launched its loyalty program integrated with its booking engine, which offers members attractive benefits from the first booking. One of the advantages of the loyalty program is showing members a price lower than the BAR (generally in parity of prices and conditions with OTAs to avoid any impact on the hotel’s ranking on Booking, Expedia, etc…)
Being an opaque price*, accessible only to specific customers who agree to become members, does not conflict with public price parity.
*Opaque pricing is where hotel rooms are sold at discounted prices while hiding the hotel’s identity until the completion of the purchase
Mirai’s trick is to make the loyalty program undetectable to OTAs and competitors while allowing customers to take advantage of it with a single click.
Now, with Quicktext, you can show these special offers to your loyalty club members with Velma AI chatbot and still have the ability to break parity with OTAs for your direct sales, but without the risk of being detected.
Read more about Mirai’s loyalty program here.
Your hotel’s AI chatbot expands your direct booking funnel
Velma, the artificial intelligence, helps hotels resolve customer queries, such as booking requests, instantly 24/7 across 30+ languages on all channels – LiveChat, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Google My Business Chat, etc.
The initial integration with Mirai allowed hotels to show available rooms with pictures, BAR price, and a deep link to complete the booking in the engine. This way, the customer could finalize their booking in one click from the chat conversation with Velma (on the web, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) ( More details about Quicktext & Mirai integration).
To date, OTAs cannot scrape chatbots or see the quotes presented to customers. Therefore, in collaboration with Mirai, we decided to display the loyalty program member price by default to maximize the visibility of that price.
Typically travelers who come to the AI hotel chatbot are the ones who want to make sure that they make the right choice and expect to get the best possible price. This integration effort allows hotels to maximize the competitiveness of their direct channel without conflicting with OTAs.
The improvement over the previous Quicktext-Mirai integration is that the price presented by the AI virtual assistant is the member price by default. Once in the Mirai booking engine, customers can become members by confirming their data.
Next steps
👉 If you have already set up the Mirai loyalty program and the Quicktext artificial intelligence solutions: You don’t have to do anything as your member price will automatically appear. If this is not the case, please get in touch with support@quicktext.im.
👉 Do you have doubts if your hotel should have a loyalty club? Read this post.
Do you want to know more about Mirai’s loyalty program? Here are several articles that can help you.
