DECEMBER 201719tell your friends about your upcoming travel, you'll start noticing custom travel deals in your feed!Social media is also crucial for brands to maintain a direct relation-ship with travellers. This has become a necessity as damage to a brand's rep-utation is one viral video away as we recently saw with Indigo Airlines. By having a direct relationship with trav-ellers, brands can have a control over the messaging.AutomationArtificial Intelligence is evolving as another key technology with the po-tential to impact our lives in a big way. And this is giving rise to bots replacing a lot of operations that have required human touch till now. Cus-tomer support and some part of sales and lead generation have already start-ed to be powered by virtual assistants and chatbots. Chatbots promise to be smarter than their human counterpart tapping into the personal information avail-able with the company and give pin-pointed solution without asking a lot of questions. They can be very effi-cient avoiding multiple phone calls, hold times and annoying "dial 1 for..." experiences. Chatbots can communi-cate with customers in their language which has been very challenging for call centres to operationalize.Call centres are a big part of the cost in the travel industry and chatbots promise to give a superior service at cheaper costs. According to a report by Gartner, 85% of our relationship with enterprises will be managed without human interaction by 2020. Going forward, it is going to be harder for consumers to find call centre num-bers for travel companies and many of the simpler interactions with travel companies are going to be powered by chatbots. WhatsApp opening up for business is going to accelerate this trend in 2018.Complimentary Smartphones in HotelsOne of the first things that we do when we reach our destination is to buy a lo-cal SIM card to stay connected - be it for booking an Uber, finding a res-taurant, booking museum tickets on the go or to stay connected with our loved ones. Many hotels have tapped into this behaviour and started provid-ing smartphones to their guests - free to use during their stay. These phones are ready with a 3G connection and many essential apps like Google Maps and Uber preloaded as well as offer free phone calls to local and some international countries. These smartphones, termed "Handy", provides a quick way to ac-cess hotel services. It also offers deals and promotions from nearby places. These devices not only provide con-venience to travellers but also save cost and increase guest's satisfaction. Hotels in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia are leading in this trend. Ex-pect more hotels to follow soon.DronesTravellers have never shied away from spending on gadgets to make their travel memorable, be it wireless port-able speakers, high-end DSLR lenses or GoPro set. Now travellers are fast adding drones to the list. Drones have become smaller, lighter and more affordable in last few years. It gives average traveller access to a technology that has been avail-able only to professionals. Drones costing Rs 10k can now shoot 4K videos and deliver a live feed from a kilometre away. Now travellers can record a bird's eye view of their ad-ventures giving a sublime touch pow-ering hundreds of likes on Facebook. Today's drones have the ability to capture breathtaking aerial shots of beaches, jungles and waterfalls from a new angle, taking us to places we normally cannot reach. Many top-end resorts are now offering drones for their guests.Selfie is making way for dronie. You are likely to see more of drone footage in your Facebook and Insta-gram feeds in 2018. As travellers share their experiences inspiring more people, brands have taken the route of influencers
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