Hotelway is a communication service between guests and hotels.
Our main goal is to improve the communication between the guests and hotels before, during, and after the trip.
What does our service do?
We create a live chat capability for hotels. The chat widget will be added to the hotel’s website. Whenever the guest enters the hotel’s webpage, the chatbox opens up and the guest can start chatting with the hotel.
First, the guest is prompted to select the language. After the selection, the guest can start to chat and ask questions from the hotel in normal free-text form, or by selecting offered options.
The guest can access that with any device with a browser, including laptop and a mobile device. It can be promoted e.g. with the booking confirmation email. No downloads or registrations needed. We also provide APIs to connect it with hotel Apps etc.
Automated AI-bot
We have created an AI-based, automated service bot, Sam, which can answer to the most frequently asked questions such as “can I bring a dog?” or “when is check-in?”. This happens in seconds. These are the questions no human should spend time answering.
We are continuously teaching Sam, so he will be better and better all the time.
Sam can answer in more difficult questions and have even simple conversations. Majority of the questions the hotels (sales team / call centre, reception, housekeeping) receive, can be categorised under 30 different topics. Sam can handle most of them by himself.
Autonomous service bot
The AI-based service bot can be built in two ways.
Firstly, the guests stay in the chat and select different choices, thus never needing to interact with humans. They can ask free text, open questions and the bot can answer with different choices to make the answer accurate.
If after all conversation and the choices presented, the guest does not find the answer, they can have a possibility to leave the question and their contact details. The hotel staff can then reply to the guest via email. This is usually 10%-15% of the questions. In other words, our service bot manages nearly 85% of the enquiries.
In the second way, Sam can also function as a chatbot, taking the FAQs and then directing the more difficult conversations to humans such as hotel call centre. We can also offer Guest Care Services, i.e. human agents to answer on behalf of the hotel for selected topics such as consulting what kind of room to book.
Upselling
Our pre-designed conversation patterns can aim for upselling, or towards something else, if the hotel so desires.
We can easily provide links to different booking engines and other promotions where the guests can purchase pre-selected items. We can integrate our services also to different systems to provide even more possibilities to sell additional items.
Reporting
We can provide weekly or monthly reports about the conversations. In addition to normal numeral metrics (how many conversations per day etc.) we can give information about the topics the guests are interested in. This can help you to direct the hotel’s sales and marketing activities.
We can also create tracking points to follow, for example what this does to the hotel’s guest satisfaction and NPS. After each conversation, the guest can rate the chat. Our satisfaction rate is 93%, while the average is only 82% (in Europe and the US).
Updating and teaching the service bot
A chat and the service bot are the first impression your guests get from your services.
A good service bot (and also a chatbot) must be constantly updated. The information cannot be obsolete, and the bot needs to improve the answers. Even the most sophisticated AI- bots need human involvement in the learning process. Teaching a bot should be left for professionals.
We are the only company providing hospitality specific service bot, which does not require any involvement from the hotel staff.
Our bot will eventually be able to provide answers for up to 85% of the conversations so the hotel staff does not have to be involved. Many hoteliers think that ‘our IT dept can update the bot’, but it is a lot more than changing the opening hours.
Statistics
Different studies show, that using a service bot or a chatbot, can increase sales between 25% and 40% depending on how it is used. In addition, it increases guest satisfaction and saves time from your staff.
Our experience proves, that the ROI is within three months. We can easily influence direct bookings and provide other additional sales. We tag different discussions and can track the metrics to prove this.
Around 75% of travellers would like to communicate with the hotels digitally, which means without phone calls or emails. And less than 10% are willing to download mobile applications. The only real and convenient option is chat.
But then the answers need to come fast. People only tolerate 45 seconds of waiting time and then they become anxious, and leave to the competition. This applies in phone calls, chat answers and searching info from the website. A service bot answers in two to three seconds.
Customising the service
Sam’s name does not have to be Sam; you name it. We can also customise the colours, greetings and other elements. You set the tone of the answers ( including humorous, relaxed, business-like) and we take care of the rest. You have also the possibility to view and change the answers.
Easy start
It takes only 30 minutes from your IT staff to copy and paste ten lines of code on your webpage. Then it works. Of course, we will gather info about your hotel and then interview your staff to fill the gaps. This does not consume more than two to three hours of their time.
Then we are up and running and we can keep the bot up-to-date based on the information you have on your webpage and/or send us via email. The results can be seen already from the first weeks.