Benefits of voice assistants in the travel and hospitality industry

Do you remember the days when you used to ask friends and relatives about the best places to stay in a new city? Or take help of travel agencies to plan your trip. With the help of Google, we are now able to plan our trips and tours without paying extra money to travel agencies.

But with this huge revolution, technology leaders are trying to make it more easy for users. How about a situation where you are in a strange city, starving and have no clue where you can get good food?

Would you like to open Google, type a query with keywords like best restaurants near me, and keep scrolling the list? Instead of this long process, why not just communicate orally with your smartphone?

The Voice Recognition system is way better and convenient than typical Google searches. Many big names such as Apple, Google, and Amazon are continuously bringing great innovations in the field of voice assistants.

Voice assistants are nothing but devices that can communicate with users, understand what users are saying and offer them the most relevant answers in real time.

Voice search came in the spotlight with Apple's Siri. Users found it very interesting and time-saving. As per a research report, 50 percent of all searches will be voice searches till the year 2020.

Gartner predicts that around 30 percent of all searches will be done without screens.

As per a report, in the year 2017, 13 percent of the USA households owned a smartphone. It is estimated that this number is set to reach 55 percent till the year 2022.

As per the estimation reports, USA will be having 21.4 million smart speakers till the year 2020.

One out of six people in the US owns a voice-activated smart-speaker.

35.6 million Americans used a voice-activated assistant device at least once a month in 2017, per eMarketer

As per a report by Location World, two out of five adults use voice search daily.

The highest percentage of smart home device owners are millennials.

It is predicted that voice commerce sales will reach to 40 billion US dollar by the year 2022.

From all the queries asked to google home, it understands 81 percent queries correctly.

One out of five customers of amazon echo has made a purchase on it through voice commands.

Let us see how Travel and hospitality can benefit from voice assistants technology and how every mobile app development company is optimizing voice search features.

1. Travel and hospitality industries are the ones that completely depend on customer experience. The customer service does not start when a customer enters the hotel room.

It starts exactly when the customer starts to book a room in your hotel. Voice control can streamline the room booking process. Voice operated hotel rooms allows customers to request for room service, ordering food, etc in real time.

There is no need to call the reception and request for any sort of service. Simply ask the voice assistant and get the answer. Not only this, the voice assistants can even book your tables at the restaurants in the area you are going to travel or for sightseeing.

2. Are you a traveler? There are two types of travelers

The first type of travelers makes foolproof plans before they leave their houses. Other types of travelers decide what to do on the eleventh hour. As per a survey, 85 percent of travelers decide what activities to perform once they reach the destination.

For this, you must have knowledge of that area. Using voice assistants can be actually a great help in such situations. You can ask the assistant to provide you with detailed information about the destination; like what are the famous tourist spots, where can you get the best food, best places for shopping, etc.

Imagine a situation where you are on road in a strange City and have no idea where to head. In that traffic and loud noise of horns, you can simply ask the voice assistants to guide you the route.

3. Have you heard about Alexa skills yet?

Alexa is a well-known voice control device. The product has its own application developer platform. It is known as Alexa skills. These skills are downloadable. Heathrow is an airport in the UK that has developed its own skill.

The Heathrow skill can be downloaded free of charge. Travelers can ask it any details about the flights they have chosen. Travelers need not search the flight details manually on Google.

They can simply ask out loud and get the answer. If this experiment works well, the company is planning to allow travelers to book tickets from skill.

4. You can offer personalization

The voice-controlled rooms can perform many things like playing TV, turning on or off the air conditioner, lighting levels, etc. You can also provide the names of the guests to make the experience more personalized.

5. Search engine optimization

Marketing is a never-ending thing for businesses. We all know how search engine optimization works. Users enter certain keywords and get the list of answers (links).

But how can travel and hospitality industry benefit from voice search SEO? The users do not type short keywords here. Rather they say a complete sentence.

For that, you have to sharpen your local SEO. This will help voice control to recommend you when such queries are asked: where is my nearest salon? It is important to get in the minds of searches.

The last but most important thing to focus on is featured snippets. Most of the voice assistants read out featured snippets when they answer voice search queries.

Conclusion:

It is not the case all the time that users have time to type a query. The reason can be anything like lack of time or something else. Travel and hospitality industries rely on customer experience.

If you succeed in offering the best in industry experience to the users, it can help the company in a huge scale.

Voice searches are the new way of searching for answers. It is important for all businesses to adopt this technology as quickly as possible.

My name is Hemendra Singh. I am Managing Director and Co-Founder of The NineHertz, a Mobile App Development Company. My ideology is that, a clear vision and hard work builds a great company.