Conclusions

Photo by SpaceX

In this blog post, we reviewed travel bots based on 6 features. There is more to consider while designing a chatbot, like disambiguation (ex. how they deal with city names that cold be in multiple countries), ambiguous input, updating values, managing failure, etc..

What we liked

Bots are new and lots of praise goes to all these companies trying to figure out the best way to use them

Cheapflights extensive help section and Hipmunk feature hints are a good way to guide new users

Link Account, as introduced by Kayak, has the potential of engaging proactively the users without being annoying. Bots should be able to start the conversation again in the future, the key is not being spammy

What we didn’t like

Having ping pong conversations due to lack of natural language understading

Limited user personalization. For example, 2 bots out of 5 didn’t recognize we were in the UK and showed prices in US Dollars. Plus, there is no clear concept of user preferences to speed up future interactions

All chatbots have only basic search capabilities, no one has result sorting (apart from a “Sort by cheapest” in Hipmunk) and filtering (ex. max price)

With limited search capabilities, travel bots seem a channel to drive traffic to apps and websites, rather than substituting them. Will users be interested in using chatbots until this gap is reduced?

Conversate is a new Artificial Intelligence startup. We built an innovative Natural Language Understanding engine, with state of the art algorithms and enterprise services. Currently in private beta, if you are interested you can sign up at http://www.conversate.eu or write us at info@conversate.eu