Today’s consumers are organising trips in a few online clicks. What’s more, they can cherry-pick from multiple providers all offering similar travel deals and discounts.
With so much choice at their fingertips, online experience is a huge influence for holidaymakers.
Enter the use case for live chat in travel and hospitality.
Give timely travel support
Nobody wants a holiday or hotel booking to go wrong. Savvy consumers will always research packages before they purchase. And, if they can’t get the information they need quickly, they’ll simply switch to another site.
Live chat in travel and hospitality enables you to give instant assistance to prospects as they browse. You can answer their travel questions, offer useful package information, and give quality customer service through your website. In doing so, you prevent your users from clicking elsewhere.
Convert enquiries into bookings
Engaged users are users who buy. Without live chat, you have no means of engaging your website visitors while they’re onsite. With it, you can seize the opportunity and get chatting – offering a true agency experience online.
So, you can track users and see the packages they’re interested in. You can then reach out with a relevant message, chatting about holiday requirements and sharing applicable offers. You can be there to explain alternate options or next steps.
You can turn simple looking into booking.
Send, receive, and share
Want to send a web visitor some snaps of a particular suite or venue? How about pushing a booking form to the visitor while they’re still live onsite? Or confirmation information immediately after an online purchase, from the same web page?
You can do all of that within a live chat session. Without launching separate windows, without the visitor leaving the website, live chat software allows you to exchange files seamlessly. Your conversations stay in a single touchpoint, for ultimate convenience.
Chat in any language
In a sector that’s dependant on international customers, you need to be able to communicate internationally. But you can’t expect your employees to speak all the world’s major languages. Live chat software means they don’t have to.
Real-time translation allows your agents to have live multi-lingual conversations with holidaymakers.
By detecting language and translating back and forth in real-time, you open your website to the world.
Right answers, right away
Explaining refund and insurance policies is a time-consuming aspect of travel and hospitality. So is giving repeated information about venues or T&Cs. Face to face, over the phone or even over email, answering FAQ can be a lengthy and unenjoyable part of the job.
Live chat software helps with that problem. Complete with intelligent canned responses and AI auto-text, WhosOn enables you to offer the correct reply in a click.
Improve your customer service
Your customers don’t want to sit and wait on hold. They don’t want to be transferred from person to person. Or to come and visit you to book in person. Or to wait days for an email response.
They want to get in touch immediately, with the right person, while they’re browsing your site. Live chat software in travel and hospitality means that customers can select who they’d like to speak to, then be connected immediately. As well as reducing call volume, you’ll reduce customer frustration.
Differentiate your website
Travel and hospitality is a saturated space. Of the many thousands of websites competing for customers, there are few that truly stand out from the crowd. Flick from one site to the next and you’ll see the same kind of design, the same kind of deals.
Live chat software sets you apart. Your website becomes less of a brochure, more of a digital service desk. With warm, friendly support, using the real names and photos of your employees, holidaymakers will feel as though they’re sitting across the desk from you.
The case for live chat in travel and hospitality
This article is only a high-level overview, and much more could be said. But simply, the best way to explore the value of live chat in the travel and hospitality industry is to trial the technology for yourself. Get started today with a free test run of WhosOn.