How to Make Travel Plans With Bots

Facebook Messenger has a whole host of chatbots just waiting to be discovered. The main advantage that these bots offer is being able to get the information you need while talking to the bot as if it was human. Expedia’s bot stands out from the crowd as one of the better travel options. The travel search and comparison site’s bot can only deal with hotels at this stage, but is extremely easy to use. Just tell the bot where you’ll be visiting, and it will ask you a line of questions that will establish the information it needs to give you the five most popular hotels to choose from. You can then request more results.

Hello Hipmunk is a bot associated with the travel search website Hipmunk. The bot is available on both Slack and Facebook, and also has email and calendar functions which make it particularly useful. When discussing your travel plans by email, you can loop in hello@hipmunk.com and ask questions such as “can you send us flight options from New York to London from March 10 – 23?” Hipmunk will then reply with the flight options and hotels if requested. Hello Calendar, a feature within Hello Hipmunk, then searches through your Google calendar and gives you flight, hotel, and car rental options based on your events.

Slack is a great workplace tool, and one of the communication platform’s greatest strengths is its bots. One of those bots is made by travel website Kayak; it allows users to ask the bot for prices on flights and hotels in group chats with coworkers. Users are also able to check the status of flights through the bot, and can use it whether on their mobile or desktop computer.

KLM, the Dutch airline, approaches chatbots in a slightly different way. When you book a flight with the airline, you are shown the KLM on Messenger plugin for Facebook, and from then on can use the chatbot. Travelers are able to have their boarding pass sent to them via Facebook, receive updates on boarding times, request a seat change and more. KLM’s bot is also useable in 13 different languages.

The Skyscanner bot, as you would imagine, lets you search for flights. The bot has a conversational tone and lets you search by a number of different filters. When you give the bot a destination, it breaks down flights into categories such as shortest, cheapest, and best. Users looking to fly off on a whim may be interested to read the results when you enter “anywhere” as the destination.