Booking.com gets intelligent and chatty!

The Online travel booking platform Booking.com has been bitten by AI. It has launched an AI trip planner that uses Open Ai’s ChatGPT, which is based on a large language model (LLM). This beta version is available only in the US and is meant to give customers a conversational and interactive experience when they plan their trips.

This trip planner with the ChatGPT component will be first made accessible only to a few select members of Booking.com's loyalty program, "Genius." The ones who use this tool can test it and give their feedback to Booking.com over the next few weeks, which they will use to improve customer experiences for each of their users.

This trip planner combines ChatGPT with Booking.com's machine-learning models and offers its customers a wide range of destination and accommodation options. The aim is to use AI to help users search for travel options and plan their trips better – and in a more intuitive manner. The ChatGPT is to give the whole experience the feeling of being assisted by a human being.

Customers will be able to ask the AI trip planner any natural language questions with regard to things like potential destinations, places to stay and for help creating their travel itineraries.

Several OTAs like Kayak and Expedia have got AI Chatbots to help simplify the process of planning a trip. Booking.com takes this a step further – in that it facilitates easy booking.

Booking.com already uses machine learning to improve customer experiences on its platform, but generative AI takes things to a different level. Its competitors are also dabbling with generative AI and so this is a much needed step forward.

Since ChatGPT is still pretty new, the incorporation of this new emerging tech in Booking.com will still be a source of great enjoyment when customers use it. This is fun and quirky – and is still a great novelty for users. So Booking.com can look forward to customers enjoying this interactive and engaging feature.

This will provide value to customers as well – apart from the novelty and fun that it brings. With the limitless information available on the internet that the AI has access to, it can make very interesting recommendations with regard to the places to visit and the places they could stay at.

The responses from the AI powered bot will be customized to suit the requirements of the user that asks. This is based on user data that the brand already possesses about its customers. And the information the AI-bot will gather as it goes along – making this a valuable exercise for brands as well, in the sense that it can get more information about users as they keep using this tool.

Because the recommendations that the bot will make will be customized to suit each user, the conversion rates will be really high. Booking.com can save on having to hire humans to answer queries – which, let’s face it - the AI can do extremely well. And a bot can be available to customers at any time during the day or night, unlike humans and their working hours.

Or their moods, depending on the time of day! Here is an intelligent (albeit artificial) bot that patiently answers questions as many times as they are asked without displaying any frustration or impatience whatsoever!

While these AI chat bots are not intended to replace humans in any way, whatsoever, brands can reap a range of benefits from the fun, conversational quotient they bring to the table. Trained well, they can really do your brand a lot of good.