How to Build an AI Chatbot for Your Travel Website

In the fast-paced world of travel, customers expect instant answers and round-the-clock service. An AI-powered chatbot on your website can provide that by interacting with site visitors, answering common questions, and routing inquiries to human agents when needed.

But how do you actually build a chatbot and connect it to your site? With the right tools, it’s surprisingly easy – no coding required. In this post, we’ll walk through step-by-step instructions on how to create your travel chatbot and take your customer service to the next level.

Choose Your Chatbot Building Platform

The first step is selecting a chatbot builder platform that allows you to easily create, customize and integrate your bot without needing to write code. There are many options out there, but here are a few top providers to consider:

My AskAI: User-friendly bot builder specifically focused on customer service use cases like travel sites. Offers premade industry templates.

Dialogflow: Owned by Google. Very robust features for conversational AI. Integration heavy.

Chatfuel: Intuitive drag-and-drop builder. Specializes in Facebook Messenger bots. Less complex.

ManyChat: Simple visual bot builder made for Facebook Messenger. Easy to get started.

For this guide, we’ll use My AskAI to build our travel chatbot since it streamlines the process with travel templates and one-click website integration.

Create Chatbot for Website with My AskAI

Once signed into your My AskAI account, you’ll be taken right into the visually oriented bot builder dashboard. Think of it like building a webpage by dragging and dropping elements – but for constructing conversations instead.

Start by choosing one of My AskAI’s travel chatbot templates to base your bot on. The pre-built templates have dialogue flows designed specifically for travel sites to handle common customer queries and scenarios.

Customize the bot template by changing the chatbot name, avatar image, intro messages and other elements to match your brand voice and tone. My AskAI makes it easy to modify the dialogue through dropdown menus – no coding is needed.

Some key things you’ll want to customize for your travel chatbot include:

Questions: Add or edit Questions people can directly ask your chatbot related to your destinations, amenities, packages and policies.

Responses: Change the bot’s Answers to maintain brand consistency and reflect your offerings.

Redirects: Set up redirects to guide visitors to specific web pages for booking, deals or more info on a topic based on their questions.

Once you’re satisfied with the chatbot flow, My AskAI lets you test the full conversation within the editor dashboard itself. Tweak any messages or flows that don’t sound right. The iterative testing helps perfect your chatbot before publishing it live.

Set Up Your Chatbot Channels

The next step is picking which communication channels you want your chatbot to be available on. My AskAI supports these main channels:

• Website: Integrate an instant chat directly into your site
• API Access
• Slack

For most travel sites, having the chatbot embedded right into your website via a live chat box is the most convenient way to engage visitors. You’ll also likely want a Facebook Messenger presence for mobile outreach.

To activate these channels, navigate to the Channels section of My AskAI and toggle on the channels you want. Customize preferences like online/offline hours per channel, location targeting and more.

Integrate Your Website Chat

Activating the website chat is just the first step. Next, you need to integrate that chatbox interface into your site pages.

Luckily, My AskAI again makes this easy with one-click integration. Simply go to the Install code section, select your website platform, copy the few lines of embed code, and then paste it into your website’s code base.

For example, if you use WordPress, you would paste the My AskAI code snippet into your themes header.php file. Most site builders also allow code injection via custom HTML widgets.

And that’s it! Once added, you’ll see your very own AI chatbot appear on your site, ready to start assisting visitors in real-time.

You can customize the widget colours, size, position and other styling during setup. Make sure to set up chat feedback surveys as well to improve your travel chatbot’s performance continuously.

Enhance With AI Capabilities

One of the biggest advantages of leveraging a platform like My AskAI is that it bakes in artificial intelligence capabilities to make your chatbot smarter over time.

As visitors converse with your bot, My AskAI employs machine learning algorithms to understand questions better and improve answers continually. It learns your specific industry terminology, analyzes sentiment, and more.

The knowledge base also scans and indexes your website content to serve up helpful redirects directly from chat. No manual link curation is needed.

You’ll also get access to NLU tools right within My AskAI to build custom intents that expand your chatbot’s comprehension range even further.

Over time, consistent AI training means fewer dead-end conversations that need human takeover. Site visitors get quick, accurate answers – leading to higher satisfaction and conversion rates.

Review Chatbot Performance

Once your travel chatbot is up and running, be sure to regularly check the My AskAI analytics dashboard to understand performance and find areas needing improvement.

Key metrics to track include:

• Conversation depth: How many questions on average before transfer/end
• Resolution rate: % of conversations resolved without human transfer
• Top questions: Most common queries to expand on
• Customer satisfaction: Chat survey feedback scoring

Using the insights, keep refining your chatbot with new dialogue tweaks, intents, redirects and content to improve results week-over-week. An optimized bot will handle 50-70%+ of common customer service inquiries for significant human resource savings.

Over to You

Adding an AI chatbot is one of the highest-impact initiatives travel brands can implement to boost service quality amid rising customer expectations. Luckily, leveraging a purpose-built platform like My AskAI streamlines the process into just a few clicks.

In no time, you can launch a custom chatbot right on your website – complete with industry templates and built-in artificial intelligence – for instant travel assistance and guidance. The result is more engaged visitors, lower costs, and expanded revenue opportunities.

Ready to get started building your travel chatbot? Create your free My AskAI account today!