How a travel group developed a self-service WhatsApp COVID response system in 4 weeks

Hotelbeds connects more than 71,000 travel distributors…

4
WEEKS TO MARKET
13,000
CONVERSATIONS RESPONDED
350k
USER QUERIES ANSWERED
24/7
Availability
9%
CONVERSION RATE IN APPOINTMENTS BOOKED
230+
Engaged landlords in 2 months
COMPANY

Hotelbeds are global leaders in the TravelTech space. Their cloud-based technology platforms offer fast and simple access to a global network of travel products, from accommodation to ancillaries, while rich data helps to generate demand.

HEADQUARTERS

Palma de Mallorca, Spain

EMPLOYEES

3000+

INDUSTRY

TravelTech

AGENCY PARTNERS
24/7
Availability
9%
CONVERSION RATE IN APPOINTMENTS BOOKED
230+
Engaged landlords in 2 months
COMPANY

Choices is one of the UK’s leading Real Estate agencies. With multiple offices in the South East of England, they manage and let 2,500+ properties on behalf of landlords, and facilitate property sales totaling millions of pounds every week.

HEADQUARTERS

London, United Kingdom

EMPLOYEES

51-200

INDUSTRY

Real Estate

Hotelbeds are global leaders in the TravelTech space, connecting and empowering businesses by facilitating bridges in the ever-changing and expanding travel ecosystem. Their cloud-based technology platforms receive 4 billion searches per day and offer frictionless access to a global network of travel products, from accommodation to ancillaries and payments, while the rich intelligence of their 258 terabyte datalake generates demand.

By operating exclusively in the B2B arena, they are uniquely placed to drive growth without competing for the end customer. Hotelbeds’ teams of 3000+ experts on the ground provide local expertise and support to boost trading, even in the most hard-to-reach spaces. Their unique blend of technology, data and passionate people serves as a catalyst for travel players aiming to unlock their full potential.

THE CHALLENGE

Creating awareness about animal cruelty and improving engagement with prospective donors to improve leads

Challenge: Humanizing support for our partners & travelers and reducing service requests and support calls

During the COVID pandemic, Hotelbeds wanted to communicate better with their customers and partners whilst reducing the mounting pressure on their customer service representatives. ‍

Piling Customer Service Requests

As the pandemic hit, all travel came to a standstill. Borders started closing, and people who had planned holidays couldn’t travel, leading to a flood of cancellations.
Every incoming customer support request required an explanation of Hotelbeds’ COVID policy, as each travel partner applied different policies with regard to cancellations. ‍

Missing proactive travel updates

During the pandemic, marketing promotions and work to optimize the booking funnel was stopped. Hotelbeds’ focus shifted to its customers and partners and, like most travel operators, it started announcing travel updates and policies on its website. However, since the updates were sudden and sporadic, customers and partners didn’t always receive the information as quickly or as clearly as they could have and so, they ended up contacting the support team. ‍
‍We wanted to go the extra mile and provide them with a channel where they could be informed proactively, decrease the level of uncertainty and service and support them swiftly.
Xavier Godoy | Customer Experience & Automation Director - Hotelbeds ‍

A race against time

Being presented with a use case of supporting partners in the pandemic, we had to act swiftly & respond fast to help our partners. Time to market was a key factor for us.

THE SOLUTION

Solution: A proactive conversational interface to self-serve users on the latest travel policies & restrictions

We were inspired by the WHO WhatsApp chatbot, which was launched at the beginning of the pandemic, and we took the challenge to create a similar solution for our partners within four weeks.

A Platform that checked all the boxes

Landbot was a clear fit from the very beginning for this use case and and met our requirements: ✅ No-code drag & drop builder ✅ Rule-based flows ✅ Integration with Webflow ✅ Availability on Facebook Messenger & WhatsApp ‍

Powerful integrations that helped go to market sooner

Building a proactive conversational interface required integrating more than a handful of tools.
  • Dialogflow for Natural Language Processing to understand the user intent, context and phrases related to refunds, cancellations and modifications in real-time.
  • Google Sheets to read, write and update user data.
‍ This was easily done using Landbot’s library of native integrations. Once Dialogflow understood the user query, it stored data in variables and relayed it to Landbot. The user was then directed to a particular flow based on the rule conditions. ‍
We had the option of doing it ourselves using Dialogflow and then integrating with WhatsApp. However, that would have taken us three months, which we could reduce to four weeks with the built-in integrations available in Landbot.

A dash of Conversational UX to keep it human

Hotelbeds gathered the best talent in the company to train the chatbot, making it a knowledge repository and giving it a tone of voice and specific messaging that would make the end user feel comforted in uncertain times. ‍
For us, this wasn’t just about embedding an FAQ in a chatbot but creating relationships with our customers and partners and helping them in times of need.

Double the reach: two channels, two brands & two languages

Landbot enabled Hotelbeds to build chatbots for WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, allowing the user to initiate a conversation on either platform. The primary function of the chatbot was to reply to COVID-related queries. ‍
We have more than 10 Facebook Pages for Hotelbeds & Bedsonline in local languages, and when a user sends a message, the chatbot replies promptly, and the bot conversation starts.

Step 4 - Campaign assets submission, review & approval

My origins are in ecommerce where lead generation can be complex. Thanks to Landbot we achieved improvements of up to 400% in 3 months, with the same advertising expense.
Marco Borsani

Marketing Manager at ARO™ (Choices)

Landbot allow us to go beyond the simple concept of chatbot or livechat and to provide to our customer and even to ourselves a complete and immersive conversational experience.
Lara Petraglia

Marketing Manager | Conversational Design

THE RESULTS

Hotelbeds automated customer service for more than 13,000 conversations and handled 350k user queries

Since the ability to handle customer support requests was limited in the first wave of the pandemic, launching a chatbot using Landbot on WhatsApp and Facebook helped Hotelbeds address user and partner concerns proactively.

From idea to customer happiness within four weeks

Hotelbeds, like all other travel companies, had a race against time during the pandemic.  Providing clarity and the correct information for their stakeholders at the earliest possible hour became the highest priority. ‍
We realized it was not prudent to develop our chatbot from scratch when it’s easier to create a chatbot using no-code tools like Landbot and save time.
Using Landbot’s no-code chatbot builder, the team could reduce the time to market to four weeks, launching the chatbot on Facebook and WhatsApp and linking it to the website. ‍

Reduced customer service backlog

The team allocated most of its resources to customer service and support. With every passing day, a new turn of events and developments around COVID restrictions led to an unprecedented surge in support requests which kept mounting and created a backlog. ‍
It helped us to reduce the backlog in customer service requests. Not only did it help lower the mounting pressure on our customer service team, but it also reduced confusion and anxiety for our clients.
But using technology to their advantage, the team used the chatbot to self-serve support requests and reduce the service backlog. ‍

Expanded customer service reach and coverage

Social media platforms were a significant source of knowledge transfer and assimilation during the pandemic. For this reason, Hotelbeds launched its self-serve chatbots on multiple platforms using Landbot’s multi-channel chatbot builder. ‍
The chatbot was a relational channel, but in our website's dedicated space containing the latest policies and destination closures, we managed more than 350K inquiries.
Xavier Godoy | Customer Experience & Automation Director - Hotelbeds ‍ Landbot enabled the team to easily replicate a chatbot flow for WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and expand its reach on as many social media platforms as possible.

CAMPAIGN TYPE
Conversational Design Bot-Powered eCommerce Campaign for an aluminum planter manufacturer.
RESULTS
Close to 5,000 chats with 40%+ conversion to lead and a CPL of 1.71€.
CAMPAIGN TYPE
Own Conversational Design Bot-Powered Facebook Campaign.
RESULTS
Over 64% lead conversion with 345 completed chats out of 536, with a CPL of 2.44$.
CAMPAIGN TYPE
Landbot on a full landing page + integration with Active Campaign for the email marketing campaign.
RESULTS
From 6665 emails sent, the open email rate was 73.64%, and 61.97% of clicks.
CAMPAIGN TYPE
Levels of engagement - email marketing campaign
RESULTS
In red, the number of opened emails are the biggest slice of the pie chart.
LEADS GENERATED
Number of leads acquired using a standard landing page VS using Landbot for lead generation.
552
😑 Landing Page
3588
🏆 Landbot
4000
3000
2000
1000
500
0
RESULTS
552 leads acquired with a landing page VS 3,588 leads using Landbot.
COST PER LEAD (CPL)
Cost per lead results when using a landing page instead of using Landbot.
Landing Page 😒
CPL of over
650$
Landbot 🚀
CPL below 400$
RESULTS
CPL of over 650$ when using a landing page VS less than 400$ with Landbot.
GROWTH WITH LANDBOT

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