Hotel Assistant: World’s first end-to-end AI voice hotel agents take 10,000 calls a day

HotelPlanner, a globally leading travel technology company powering millions of hotel bookings worldwide, has announced the launch of Hotel Assistant, the world’s first end-to-end global team of AI powered booking assistants fielding calls from customers around the world for reservations across more than one million properties.

HotelPlanner.ai has agents fluent in 15 languages, all of which have been programmed to offer humanised conversations with customers using cutting-edge algorithms to deliver tailored recommendations for every type of traveller. The agent can respond to customer requirements, check the availability and price out suitable rooms, explain the unique nature of the room type, booking terms and respond to detailed questions about each hotel before processing a credit card booking. The agents have been trained based on over eight million recorded calls with HotelPlanner gig-economy travel agents around the world, allowing the AI agents to engage in friendly and emotionally intelligent two-way conversation with users.

Since the launch of the platform, HotelPlanner’s AI assistants have been taking on average 10,000 customer calls a day with access to an inventory of over one million properties worldwide. HotelPlanner’s AI assistants are already looking after the hotel needs of customers in English, Hindi, Mandarin, French, German Spanish, Portuguese, Greek and Turkish, with more languages to be added. Customers can also choose to book their travel with famous characters, such as Donald Trump and Santa Claus. Revenue generated by reservations made with the latter will be donated to the Toys for Tots charity, an organisation delivering hope to children at Christmastime and beyond.

“We launched our Gig economy call centre during Covid. It’s been incredibly successful with over 7,000 active salespeople, but the number of available agents limited our growth. We used data from over 8,000,000 reservation calls to train AI Voice assistants to not only look after our customers many queries but sell rooms in a streamlined, enjoyable and efficient experience that has never been seen before.” said Tim Hentschel, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of HotelPlanner.

“The initial feedback from users has been incredible. The AI agents are incredibly advanced, so much so that we’ve actually had users claim that they were unaware they were speaking to an AI powered expert and not a human. The ability for the AI assistants to engage in emotionally intelligent conversations is revolutionary.”, Hentschel added.

The assistant can deal with complex and bespoke queries such as: Hi James, I’m looking for a family friendly hotel, within a 4-hour flight of West Palm Beach, FL. I live on the beach, so I don’t want a beach resort, and I want it to be 4 or 5 stars and have an indoor pool. Feedback from users has been overwhelmingly positive, with many praising the technology for its efficiency and ease of use. Customers can also request to talk to a human agent, but such is the quality of the service that this is a very rare occurrence.

“We are incredibly excited to lead the charge in integrating AI into the travel booking experience,” said John Prince, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of HotelPlanner. “HotelPlanner.AI not only simplifies the booking but as our AI Assistants continue to learn they will only get better. Now our human call centre team can look after customers with the more complicated and higher value bookings.”

By Kanchan Nath