At the time of writing this, the global number of confirmed COVID-19 cases has reached 207 855. As countries scramble to respond to the crisis, borders are closed and services shut down. The situation evolves quickly, and one of the most important things – and challenges – is to keep the public informed with effective communication.
The situation looks dire, without a doubt. Travel and hospitality are some of the industries hit most severely. But we at Hotelway are confident that by collaboration and openness to change we will make it through this.
We believe that hotels could really use some help in their guest communication during these trying times. Guests have begun – and will for some time – swamp hotels’ channels with questions and concerns about the pandemic and its effects on their stay. According to our data, upwards of 70% of all guests’ questions to hotels during the pandemic have concerned COVID-19. It might be very difficult to address all of them on simple web pages or emails. We want to provide hotels with an easy way to address these questions and ease the strain on their staff.
So, we have decided to offer a free FAQ-bot that helps hotels manage their communication during this exceptional time. We will keep the bot up-to-date while their staff can focus on other important functions. The bot also includes other useful information for guests: check-in/out times and room and restaurant information for example. The possibility stands until June – and longer if the crisis so demands.
We hope that it will soon be time to recover and start rebuilding. We hope to help hotels with that as well. This crisis forces people and businesses to adopt even more online tools and services to use in their daily lives. It is natural to assume a similar continuum for hotels as well, meaning that services such as chatbots will become even more relevant. Our chatbot promotes the hotel’s services, encouraging potential guests to engage with them when they are ready to plan their stays again.
We want to make this as easy as possible for hotels. Setting this up will require less than an hour of work from the hotel and the bot will be up and running in a day or two, depending on our current workload. And as mentioned above, we commit to keeping every bot up to date with all relevant information regarding the hotel as well as the crisis at large.
