Travel Chatbot for Mona Tours, an online platform for travel and tourism packages

Neta Gafni – Digital Marketing Manager, https://www.monatours.co.il/

Introduce your business and tell us about yourself: What does your business do? What is your role?

I’m Neta, the Digital Marketing Manager for Mona Tours. Our company is a travel and tourism platform with an extensive range of services. We offer hundreds of products and travel packages through our digital channels, including international flight bookings, budget vacation deals, organized tours, and more. Our customers include individual travelers as well as corporations, government agencies and foreign embassies. In my role as Digital Marketing Manager for Mona Tours, I work on optimizing our online services such that they encourage more people to choose us for their travel and vacation needs.

What problems/challenges did you have and why did you decide to create a Chatbot?

Ever since travel and tourism agencies started offering their services online, the competition in this market has shot up. We now have the challenge of competing with hundreds of other agencies offering similar services. For people to choose us over them, we have to keep our prices attractive, and offer a very high standard of customer service. And over the past few years, we’ve had to direct a lot of our focus to our mobile presence.

Most travelers today book and manage their vacations and travels on their phones. So if we don’t focus on mobile marketing and support, we stand to lose out on a major segment of our target audience. This is why we went with the idea of a chatbot, adding it to the 5-6 websites and landing pages that we run. Chatbots seemed to be an effective and affordably priced tool for capturing our visitors’ attention and converting them into paying customers.

What was the result of adding your Chatbot to your business/website? And what did you learn from it?

It’s been great. We’ve tripled the number of quality leads generated by our landing pages. And we’ve had scores of positive comments from visitors on our websites. The stats back this up as well, showing that our visitor engagement figures have improved, bounce rates have gone down, and visitors are spending more time on our websites.

I believe a lot of this success can be credited to the fact that we defined the right “chat goals” for our website and landing page chatbots. This was also our main take-back from our chatbot development exercise. We looked into the purpose of each platform, and prepared separate chat scripts for each bot, using messages and actions that would get us the best ROI. And we can see the results of this process on paper now.

What are your top recommendations for businesses just starting with their own Chatbot?

Know that your chatbot is a powerful marketing tool, because it can communicate with your potential customers in a way that no ad campaigns can. This is a vital piece of information when you’re just starting out. You want to get more business, for which you need more customers. But potential customers can’t buy your products if they don’t even know that these products exist. New businesses don’t usually have much money to spend on advertising, so the key to generating more publicity is to increase visitor engagement. In my opinion – and in my experience – chatbots are the most effective and affordable way to spread the word about your products.