Your goal as a travel company is to be aware of how travelers search for a flight, but also when, where, and what’s truly motivating them.
According to Expedia, a typical customer searches up to 48 times before booking a flight. To provide travelers with a seamless Search experience, it’s no longer enough to display the resulting flight options.
3. PRESENTER
Greg Mushen
Director of Product Management,
Flight Shopping at Expedia, Inc.
@gregmushen
PRESENTER
Misael Leon
Product Designer at Nearsoft
@misaello
HOST
Kim Lantis
Content Coordinator at Nearsoft
@kimlantis
I’m Emily
6. 1. How We Search for Flights
2. How Chatbots Change the Search Experience
3. Creating a Flight Concierge Chatbot Experience
4. How to Display Search Results
5. Takeaways
Our Time Together...
15. — Expedia
“For a given round trip flight search
between two destinations, there can be
billions of flight combinations, even when
only looking at a single departure and
return date.
22. Flight search is a hard
computational problem…
also a tedious task for the user
23. Travelers like to think they have a trick
or strategy for finding the best airfare,
but in reality we are all searching for and
reserving tickets in similar fashion.
— Skift
“
24. How We Search for Flights
~60%
Websites
~35%
Tools
Results on
Paper
25. How We Search for Flights
Getaway
1 mo
Weeklong
3 to 6 mo
Holistic
Search
27. What is a Chatbot?
A chatbot is a program which conducts a
conversation via auditory or textual
methods.
Designed to convincingly simulate how a
human would behave as a conversational
partner.
28. ● Certain queries may be more natural in chat
interface
e.g. When is the best time to go to Mallorca?
Why use a Chatbot?
29. ● Certain responses may be more understandable
in chat.
e.g. The lowest price from Seattle to Mallorca is
$1200, but if you fly out of Vancouver, BC the
lowest price is $900. There is a 90% chance the
price for this route will increase at least $100 in
the next two days.
Why use a Chatbot?
31. ● Contact to sales agents
● Inspire about destinations
● Alarms on fare opportunities
● Search and find flights
● Info on in-trip information
● Tips on getting cheap flights
● Info on flight status
Examples...
Specific
Problem
64. Bare Minimum Information
1. Airports
2. Departure / Arrival Date and Time
3. Length of flight
4. Number of Stops
5. Price
6. Category
7. Action Item
75. TAKEAWAYS
Rethinking Flight
Shopping with
Conversational
Search… with
Chatbots
1. Chatbots are booming
Do well one touchpoint of the funnel
2. Make a friendly personality
Use of Natural Processing Language
3. Cover all possible scenarios
Use inline prompts and buttons as call to actions
4. Display bare minimum results
Provide clear action items for each result
5. Have a graceful exit strategy
Create a general statement and/or propose a next step