MUMBAI: Yatra.com strengthened their travel booking offering by launching a series of exciting new features. These innovative technological solutions cater to different touch points in their business and further ease the booking process. The features launched - a Facebook chat bot to enable booking tickets, a self serve platform to address customer queries, and a market place chat platform to enable travellers to chat in real time with the sellers – are leading edge technology features that are a first for the Indian travel Industry.
Yatra.com president Sharat Dhall says, “It has been our constant endeavour to stay in touch with the pulse of the traveller and up-grade our products accordingly. Today we are excited to unveil the chat bot for Facebook Messenger, a first in the Industry and a convenient way for travelers to quickly see travel options and make bookings. Facebook has a wide user base, and this chat option will enable travellers to experience Yatra in a seamless fashion without moving out of Facebook. Also the self serve and market place chat tools help ease the booking process and improve the overall customer experience.”
Today’s traveller, thanks to the internet, is very well informed and believes in thorough research before deciding on their travel. Facebook is the largest social network and a number of travellers also take advice from friends before making travel plans. In addition, Yatra has a vast reach of almost 1.5 lakh Facebook followers who are looking to make bookings and enquiring about best deals. To leverage this audience, Yatra has launched an intelligent chat bot which helps customers search and book flights directly from their FB messenger. Itis an intuitive platform which helps consumer search in natural language and can handle even complicated queries. Chat bots let users perform tasks within messenger apps that would otherwise be done in a separate app. The company can use these bots to target users on platforms they frequent rather than making them download the company’s app to book.
Yatra had earlier launched a holidays marketplace, as it enabled a wide range of packages and the best prices as buyers and sellers could directly interact and complete the transaction with no intermediaries. The marketplace chat platform that has just been launched serves as a direct connect between the customer and the re-seller. It has been built with the ability to have text based chats or direct voice calls. Customers can also share attachments via the chat. Discreetness is given due importance with customer privacy being completed maintained.
Yatra has also introduced a self serve platform that can answer customer queries as it works like an automated FAQ machine, where responses to generic queries are pre-fed. In addition, based on the kind of queries posted by customers, the base of responses can be enhanced making the tool all the more powerful and efficacious.
