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For the first session on Wednesday, we were joined by Rajneesh Badal (Travel with Zoey) and Ondrej Mitas (Breda University of Applied Sciences) for a discussion on digital travel butlers and providing personalised travel suggestions and ultimately looking into influencing travel behaviours. Rajneesh and Badal have previously collaborated on researching Zoey on destination experiences. In this session, they provided us with insights on the technology, its prospects and its advantages.

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Zoey is a travel butler developed to support travellers with decision-making and booking processes during all stages of travel. In practice, Zoey is just another contact in your contact lists with whom you can chat. Zoey responds with answers validated by moderators. Zoey has been developed based on a database of real circumstances and travel insights. Ondrej added that digital solutions such as Zoey are aimed to make travel experiences personal and manipulate the information that tourists receive.

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The speakers mentioned that destinations are always looking for the best way to digitally communicate with travellers and draw communication strategies for enhanced visitor experiences. Zoey is the solution to the gap in the market, providing real-time assistance during travels. Zoey supports decision-making before the trip and continues to support travellers during the travel period with suggestions and insights. Post-travel, Zoey gathers feedback on destination experiences.

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In the early stages, Zoey was mainly moderated by humans, with around 9 out 10 questions answered manually. However, over time the tool has been increasingly automated. As Ondrej and Rajneesh explained, human interaction is important to keep on top of the content and the experience. Improvements in the automation services mean human moderators could be less involved while maintaining the quality of the information provided through the service.

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In terms of service, travellers look for accuracy of information. It is important to create satisfactory, pleasing, decent-quality recommendations. Zoey has been successful in making travel recommendations and introducing fewer visits location in the destination to visitors scoring higher compared to map-based apps available. The quality of the automated service has meant that often travellers, after a few interactions, ask if the experience is solely through a bot. In fact, it is both. Moderators enhance the service with their contribution.

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Destinations can benefit from similar chatbots easily. All that is needed is a database of less visited places, a filtering system and an evaluation of which locations are ready to receive visitors. Most well-known places are visible on search engines such as Google. The art is to make recommendations to other attractions.

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To conclude, the panel mentioned that Research, Optimisation, and Improvement are key. The process requires constant data measures, observations and collecting insights.