To solve the traveler conundrum of airplane seat selection, Indian booking engine Goibibo has integrated with WhatsApp.
The online travel agency, which, in addition to flights offers hotel, bus and activity bookings, uses artificial intelligence to inform WhatsApp users when their preferred seats for flights are filing up.
Using Goibibo’s in-house conversational bot, GIA, and WhatsApp for Business, the service is intended to save travelers time and offer a mobile-centric solution to what can be a tedious process.
“Though travellers were able to book their favorite flights on Goibibo at awesome prices, not getting the desired seats made the whole experience little sour,” says Salil Chatrath, senior product manager at Goibibo, in a post on Medium.
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“We wondered, all OTAs have seat selection flows for some time now, then why [is seat selection still a problem]?”
The challenges in designing for a conversational platform included showing the entire layout on the screen, designating different seat price points, limiting the number of user inputs and making the design scalable.
The design of the communication ultimately uses different colored hearts to indicate seat availability, and users can reply back using simple, conversational language to select preferences.
The company reports that in the first few days after the service launched, seat bookings increased by five times.
Currently, WhatsApp seat selection is only live for Indigo bookings, but Goibibo plans to scale to all major domestic and international flights soon.