With their multilingual, 24/7 service, chatbots for hotels are on the rise.
“Chatbots are going to change hotel stays,” explains Badr Lemkhente, CEO of intelligent hospitality company hostifAI. “They provide personalized, 24/7 assistance.”
Lemkhente has implemented AI chatbots across the hotel industry, from small riads to renowned hotel chains. He’s seen how their integration leads to “a more efficient, data-driven, and guest-focused approach.”
In an industry that requires 24/7 support, hotels are ripe for the integration of AI agents. It won’t be long before chatbots become the standard in the hotel industry.
In this article, we’ll explain how hotel chatbots work, their key features, and provide examples of their success in the field.
Why use a chatbot in your hotel?
Chatbots and the hotel industry are a natural fit.
An AI agent can provide instant responses for guests, drive direct bookings, and offer free multilingual support. Every aspect of the guest experience can be enhanced by a well-designed and well-integrated AI chatbot.
One of the key hotel chatbot features is their multilingual nature. They cater to international guests by providing services in their mother tongue, no matter where they’re from.
Hotel chatbots tend to increase guest satisfaction thanks to their efficiency, responsiveness, and personalization.
Higher guest satisfaction
Because hotel services are implemented by humans, the quality of guest services can vary widely. The experience of your guest will depend not only on which member of staff they interact with, but the staff member’s mood and level of business.
When hotel support services are inconsistent, hotels face lost revenue streams. If the concierge line is too long, a couple may turn to Google reviews instead of asking for a restaurant recommendation.
International guests benefit the most from a hotel chatbot – with a personal assistant that speaks multiple languages, it’s easy for guests of all linguistic backgrounds to make the most of their hotel’s services.
Automating customer service processes is a shortcut to consistent, high-quality service – a cornerstone of a positive guest experience.
Personalized experience
Because a hotel chatbot is powered by artificial intelligence, it can improve its recommendations for individuals the more they use it.
Imagine a couple that asks their hotel chatbot for a restaurant recommendation on the first night of their stay. They specify they want a seafood restaurant with a robust wine list. The second night, they ask the Butler for another recommendation – but something with an ocean view this time.
The hotel chatbot will learn the restaurant preferences of the guests over the week. It will be able to provide entirely different recommendations than it would other guests based on their feedback.
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If your hotel has repeat visitors, the chatbot will be able to recall previous interactions and preferences. It might ask a returning family whether they’d like to continue ordering their usual breakfast, or offer a beer via room service to a traveling professional who often orders one around 9pm.
A hotel chatbot offers a personalized guest experience that isn’t possible at scale. Guest preferences vary too widely to be personally served by human staff each time.
And of course, a chatbot can delete any guest data at the visitors’ request.
More support for staff
Every staff member of a hotel knows what it’s like to receive a rush of requests at the same time. While we’re sometimes able to handle each guest request with care and attention to detail, it’s not always possible during busy periods. Overwhelmed hotel staff means low morale for staff, more errors, and more dissatisfaction for guests.
Due to the busy nature of the hospitality industry, most staff actions tend to be reactive instead of proactive. It can be difficult to think ahead when you’re constantly putting out fires.
Chatbots provide a level of relief for hotel staff. When a guest can ask a chatbot for a request instead of a human, it ensures prompt service and a positive interaction – no matter how busy it is.
Chatbots are able to streamline internal operations of a hotel team, automatically dividing up complex requests from guests. As Lemkhente explains:
A streamlined system has two benefits: it improves the effectiveness and morale of hotel staff, while increasing their ability to provide high-quality customer service. Both staff and customer satisfaction are increased by the addition of a chatbot.
Case study: HostifAI
In the hotels he services with AI chatbots, hostifAI Badr Lemkhente has seen remarkable strides in efficiency, customer satisfaction, and savings.
75% of conversations handled without humans
A well-built chatbot will always have the option to escalate to a human agent. But with the best bots, guests don’t need to be transferred to a human. Lemkhente has found that 75% of Virtual Butler discussions end without needing to be transferred to a human – the Butler is able to handle the interaction from start to finish.
The Virtual Butlers don’t create more work from humans – they take repetitive tasks off their plate. When guests have the option to interact with a chatbot, most use it freely, reducing the number of solicitations at the concierge and front desk.
~100% reading rate
Email open rates are notoriously hard to crack. Most of us aren’t bothered to read through the endless stream of emails in our inbox.
But when using a chatbot to begin a guest’s journey, the large majority of them click to read through – almost 100% of guests.
These read-through rates are non-existent with traditional communication methods – a good email can reach a 40% open rate, explains Lemkhente. But a chatbot engages directly and personally with incoming guests via channels they use daily, like WhatsApp, Telegram, or Facebook Messenger.
7/10 guests interact before arrival
Virtual Butlers aren’t just bells and whistles: 70% of guests interact with their hotel’s chatbot before even arriving on site. These numbers only go up once guests arrive at their hotel.
One of the most beneficial features of a hotel chatbot is its easy access to extra services – it can reserve seats at a hotel’s restaurant or sign them up for a local tour guide.
Lemkhente has found that 2 out of 10 guests have already purchased extra bookings through the chatbot before arriving at the hotel. They have easy access to everything from dining options to upgrading their hotel room – the chatbot is able to serve guests even before they arrive.
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How to implement hotel chatbots
Virtual Butlers are most commonly deployed on WhatsApp, but they can also exist on your hotel website, Telegram, and Facebook Messenger.
To get your chatbot running sooner rather than later, you’ll want to use a chatbot software to build your hotel chatbot. The best chatbot platform will depend on your business needs. For a hotel operation, you’ll likely want a platform that includes:
- A wide variety of language translation capabilities
- Pre-built integrations with your internal data sources
- Pre-built integration with your desired channels of deployment (e.g. WhatsApp or Telegram).
A hotel chatbot will enhance guest experience for most, but there will always be traditional communicators who prefer human agents. Your chatbot should be synched with internal systems, as Lemkhente explains:
Adding more communication channels is never a negative, if seamlessly integrated. In this digital day and age, guest communication is becoming more and more digital. Providing a digital communication option allows guests to communicate however they prefer.
Types of chatbots for hotels
Virtual butlers
The front-facing hotel chatbot is typically designed as a Virtual Butler. They often exist on WhatsApp, due to the international nature of the guests they serve.
Virtual butlers can handle nearly all guest interactions, including the hotel booking process, suggesting activities and attractions, facilitating room upgrades, and selling hotel amenities like transportation.
These AI powered chatbots can support the guest journey from start to finish – they offer personalized guest services and multilingual support at all times of day. These enhanced capabilities mean that hotel chatbots tend to increase guest satisfaction after implementation.
Management and staff assistance
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While the idea of a hotel chatbot conjures up images of virtual concierges, hotel chatbots are just as useful for internal teams.
The hospitality industry is busy and it can be difficult to streamline communications. Staff often resort to inconsistent communication channels to coordinate. But a chatbot can streamline all guest requests and easily transfer them to the correct teams in real time.
Staff can also process requests and reports through the chatbot. If your chatbot has multimodal capabilities, a staff member can log an incident by taking a photo of a broken lamp. Maintenance is easily able to see the damage and swiftly action a repair. Most importantly, there’s no time delay in processing the information.
Management can also use an AI powered chatbot to coordinate and measure staff effectiveness. It’s easy to assign a task to a certain member of staff. And the chatbot provides a platform for management to see if assigned tasks are being handled on time.
The scalability of passing off routine questions and requests to an AI chatbot frees up the time of hotel management and staff to focus on more important tasks. Well-built hotel chatbots are always able to escalate a conversation to human agents when needed – but 75% of chatbot conversations in hotels never need human intervention.
What is a virtual butler?
A Virtual Butler is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot designed to assist guests with bookings, requests, and other hotel services. They’re used by guests and employees alike to streamline hotel operations.
Guests can interact with a virtual butler before, during, and after their stay. AI chatbots facilitate a direct booking process from start to end, including payment.
And because a chatbot can automatically translate information, it can interact with guests in their own language, no matter where they’re visiting from.
During their stay, the Butler can answer a wide variety of customer queries, from where to rent a boat to dining service options. Guest communication is available 24/7 with a Virtual Butler.
Direct Bookings
A hotel booking chatbot can take core of the booking process from start to finish. Chatbots can encourage direct bookings for future guests, as they’re available 24/7 and offer support in multiple languages.
For efficiency and accuracy, all hotel bookings should be processed through a central booking engine. This booking engine processes all reservations, whether they come from website visitors or messaging apps.
Across channels, a hotel booking chatbot is in perfect sync with your central reservation system. They can check which rooms are available and then list them as occupied as guests book through the system.
Due to their wide net of support – both linguistic and time availability – a hotel reservation chatbot is capable of boosting direct bookings. It’s simple: make it easy for potential guests to book and they will.
Hotel booking is a straightforward enough process that hotels tend to receive bookings via their website. But a hotel booking chatbot can meet guests wherever they are – and it make sit easy for guests to receive personalized recommendations of related services.
And hospitality chatbots can book more than room reservations – if your hotel offers other amenities, guests can use your bot to make direct reservations for spa services, restaurants, or activities.
FAQ and Services
One of the simplest roles of an AI hotel chatbot is answering frequently asked questions.
A hotel chatbot doesn’t even need AI technology in order to become an FAQ resource. Even old-fashioned, rule based chatbots can answer common guest queries.
A hotel chatbot can easily act as a tourism advisor, recommending local attractions and booking services like buses or tours. These recommendations can either be suggested and programmed by customer service staff, or purely AI powered.
Hotel chatbots can enhance the customer experience by providing virtual concierge services. Instead of relying solely on a human – who might have a long line of guests or be stuck in a sticky situation – guests have the option to interact with a free virtual assistant.
How does a hotel chatbot work?
A good hotel chatbot will be AI powered, and use natural language processing to mimic human conversations. Natural language processing (NLP) allows your bot to sound human, be responsive to conversational cues, and detect emotions like frustration in your guests.
Many NLP tasks – like language translation and sentiment analysis – use machine learning models to process and understand language. As companies like OpenAI and Google make advances in machine learning, these NLP capabilities improve alongside them.
If you use a chatbot software that automatically updates your bot to the latest large language models (LLMs), your bot will become increasingly advanced as the wider technology landscape improves.
Hotel chatbots are able to integrate with your internal systems to seamlessly add AI-powered information and coordination to your hotel services. It’s best to use a chatbot-building platform that allows you to connect your bot to multiple channels and all your internal systems.
Build a hotel chatbot today
The best hotel chatbot is one that fits your needs. Botpress allows you to connect your bot to internal systems, take actions on behalf of guests, and automatically translate into 100+ languages.
Your hotel chatbot will always be upgraded to the latest LLM technology, allowing your hotel to easily scale AI across internal and external business processes.
From major chains to independent hotels, soon AI chatbots for hotels will be the norm. Get ahead of the curve by building your bot today.
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