Live2support Spotlight: Live Chat for the Travel and Tourism Industry

If you happened to be one of those blessed service professionals from the hospitality sector who derives a profound sense of happiness by sending folks away to dream destinations and exotic lands where a million stars twinkle in the midnight sky, the past few years have probably been the most eventful years of your career owing to a sea change in the hospitality revenue model and the arrival of the Internet.

The travel and hospitality industry is not what it was a decade ago. As a senior industry executive puts it, ”ever since the airlines stopped remitting agency commissions to us, our revenue structure has undoubtedly gone for a toss.” Not all is lost yet. The travel industry continues to bounce back slowly but surely as new revenue models emerge and old models experience a paradigm shift.

For the purposes of this case study, let us construct a case study scenario. An affluent and up-market immigrant couple wishes to take their teenage daughter to mother country after fifteen years so that her thousand questions about her roots, genealogy, cultural identity—where she is from, who her cousins are, and more importantly, the “need to belong” are addressed. Since the parents were not smart enough to preserve family ties with home country relatives and family acquaintances, modern telecommunications and the Internet not withstanding, no assistance is directly available to them. Their quest for a qualified and reliable travel services company takes them too many websites, mostly with phone numbers in distant cities. There will be many long distance phone calls so this may not be the perfect alternative.

The homeward bound couple suddenly chances upon the website of a travel agency which provides live chat service four about 16 hours a day. They initiate a friendly live chat conversation immediately and before they know it, their travel plans have crystallized complete with airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rentals and even rail tickets for domestic travel.

Live chat and the travel and tourism industry are literally made for each other. Here is why:

The all-inclusive hospitality industry, which includes domestic and international travel in all its manifestations, is the largest service sector in existence today. It is even larger than the insurance sector if you compare turn over figures. Hence, the need to provide top-notch customer support is paramount and all pervasive. Instead of stating the obvious and detailing the logical benefits of live chat on a travel website, let us tell you how some of the latest features of live support can integrate with the service delivery process.

With the help of potent screen capture features such as Co-browsing and SnapShot both of which are now built into Liv2Support, chat operators can take travel customers directly to photographs and visuals from enchanting travel destinations featured on web pages and literally explain them through live chat which remains active at all times. You can even show maps, floor plans of resorts and webcams and share the USPs of the locations you and your travel advisors recommend. You obviously cannot do that with a telephone.

For whatever reason, customers prefer to maintain anonymity while shopping for both bargains and premium services. Live chat software makes this possible because there are no caller ID screens embedded into live chat and customers are free to discuss their travel plans or ask for recommendations without having to reveal their names or their locations. They will surely emerge out of the woodworks with their credit cards or Paypal accounts in hand once you have taken the time to understand their travel needs and come up with perfect choices. Bottom line? The airlines may have turned off the faucet but the Internet with live chat, as the enabler of a two-way communication, now makes it possible for you to tap into a global customer base, which hitherto did not exist for you and was in all probability beyond your reach. As they say, “you lose some, you get some.”

The ability to generate a printed transcript of the live chat conversation is not exactly a recent phenomenon. However, in the broader context of the travel and tourism industry, it tends to gain special significance. Vital statistics such as travel dates, names of holiday locations, airline fares, hotel tariffs and other data no longer have to be copied down while customers hold the phone in one hand. Potential customers can even take the printed chat transcript home with them based on the information your chat operators provide so that they can discuss your travel recommendations over dinner with their family.

If you happen to belong to the travel fraternity or are planning to join the ranks of the travel industry, just building a website is not enough any more. Consider signing up for live chat service from a reputed live chat service provider and watch how that live chat button drives up your traffic counts, your customer interaction levels and eventually, your revenues.