Can Your Hotel Afford Not To Have Website Chat Capability?

When it comes to choosing a place to stay, most people begin their search on Google and eventually find their way to Expedia and Booking.com – better known as Online Travel Agents (OTAs). In fact, research has shown that guests will visit an average of 38 different sites, including hotel websites and review sites, before making their final decision. Ironically, more than 80% return to the OTAs to make their final booking. Here’s what that means for your hotel:

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It is highly likely that guests visited your site before booking but didn’t book directly with you. Instead, they either:

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a. booked through an OTA, which means you lost at least 20% of your revenue.

b. booked another hotel, which means you completely lost the booking.

What if there were a way to keep those guests?

We decided to add chat capability to our own hotel website to see if we could engage our visitors and give them a reason to book direct. Sure enough, it was like opening up the flood gates. The questions started to come rolling in.

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“What are your rates?

Do you have availability for next weekend?

Can I check-in early?”

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We had discovered a new sales channel that had always been there on our website but never tapped into. The problem was that our staff were too busy to answer their questions.

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Now we had to figure out a way to handle all these chats.

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What’s GuestChat?
Think of it as a front desk receptionist that’s always there on your hotel website, ready to offer rates, answer questions, and make reservations. It’s available 24/7, understands multiple languages, and can seamlessly hand off to your front desk. It increased our direct bookings by 9%. This is not your old-fashioned chatbot; it’s the next generation of AI-powered conversational agents. That’s right! It runs on ChatGPT-4o.

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It’s like another member of our staff who’s answering questions for us on our web page, so we can concentrate on everything else that requires the human touch. And here are the actual numbers for our own hotel as we came out of the pandemic:

Can your hotel afford not to have website chat capability?
Without a website chat feature, your hotel is leaving revenue on the table and missing out on valuable direct bookings. As the data shows, hotels that implement AI-powered chat solutions like GuestChat see a significant increase in direct bookings, less staff time wasted on repetitive inquiries, and improved visitor engagement and website duration.

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In today’s competitive hospitality market, providing an exceptional online experience is essential for standing out and converting website visitors into guests. GuestChat’s state-of-the-art conversational AI acts as your hotel’s 24/7 virtual receptionist – answering questions instantly, providing personalized service, and making the direct booking process effortless.

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Don’t let another booking slip through the cracks and into the hands of OTAs. Invest in the cutting-edge technology that has already transformed the direct booking numbers of hotels just like yours. Contact us today to learn how GuestChat can maximize your property’s direct bookings and revenue.