Travelers are putting chatbots to work to find the best deals

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Christopher Elliott, Travelers United

Travel chatbots are having a moment. 

It's about time. 

After a few false starts, these automated programs that answer basic questions, find deals or secure refunds are slowly coming into their own. And they might be worth trying. 

A bot is an application that performs an automated task, such as telling you the weather or conducting an online search. 

Most of the bots I'm discussing here are referred to as chatbots -- programs you interact with through chat. You send it a message and it responds automatically, sending you information, making a query on your behalf or booking a ticket. 

Airlines are using bots to deliver boarding passes and itinerary information to customers. 

The latest innovations automatically check your airline ticket to see if your fare has dropped and then negotiate a refund. 

Online travel agencies are using them to help travelers find better deals. 

"Over the past year we have seen travel bots take flight," says Itai Leibowitz, product manager for Facebook's Messenger platform, which hosts many of them. 

The earliest travel bots were only marginally useful. They offered unsophisticated or unhelpful responses. The watershed moment came two years ago, when Facebook opened its platform to developers. Last year, Facebook launched chat extensions that allow multiple people to chat with the same business at the same time. 

Among the most prominent Facebook-based travel bots are Kayak, which helps you find flight and hotel deals through an instant messaging interface, and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, which delivers 15 percent of its boarding passes through Messenger, according to Leibowitz. 

Facebook isn't alone. When Anant Akash, a computer-science major at the University of Michigan, needed to fly from San Francisco to Detroit recently, he found a one-stop flight for $200 on Spirit Airlines. 

He also signed up at DoNotPay.com for a bot that monitors your flight or hotel booking and alerts you to price drops. The bot works behind the scenes, contacting the airline, hotel or online agency and securing a refund. 

"Our product forces airlines to pay people whenever the price of their ticket drops," says Joshua Browder, the Stanford University sophomore who developed the program as an add-on to the website he founded to let people automatically appeal parking tickets. 

And that's exactly what happened to Akash. Within a few hours of his booking, DoNotPay texted Akash to let him know it had found a cheaper flight on Delta Air Lines, which saved him $46. It was also a nonstop flight. 

DoNotPay requires a Gmail address and can access parts of your email. You also have to give it a credit-card number so it can process your refund. It automatically monitors the itineraries in your inbox. (Because I have hundreds of flight and hotel itineraries in my inbox, it made testing DoNotPay impossible for me.) Despite some limitations, travel bots point the way to an exciting future, where you can book travel using your voice on your Google Home or Amazon Echo. 

"For example, you would be asking the voice assistant for a beach destination trip for spring break," says Greg Abbott, a senior vice president of travel and hospitality at DataArt, a technology consulting firm. Your device already knows how many people, and the dates, by checking your calendar for any conflicts and your personal preferences. 

Some sectors of the travel industry are understandably threatened by the increased use of automation. Developers say the bots only handle clerical tasks and would not replace human agents. But as the applications become more sophisticated, that could change. 
