An Artificial Intelligence agent can revolutionize guest services by offering information about bookings, sending invoices via email, and updating reservation details. With Apaleo, the API-first open property management platform, and no-code technology, you can set up this powerful app in just a couple of hours, then extend it to encompass any service you can imagine.
If you’ve ever had even the briefest conversation with ChatGPT, you might question its suitability as an accurate, attentive booking assistant for your hotel. AI bots are known for convincingly presenting imagined scenarios as facts and can be vulnerable to manipulation. In contrast, hotel customer service demands precision in presenting room availability, quotes, and booking options while safeguarding customer privacy and data security.
So, can an AI-enabled tool become a reliable booking assistant? We, at Makeitfuture, believe the answer is yes. And fast! As a no-code automation company, we are able to quickly build AI agents and deploy them for our customers. We are specialized in developing reliable AI systems trained on customized company data, balancing data precision and friendliness. Using Apaleo and Make.com, we built a chatbot that is capable of providing correct booking data to verified customers.
Want to see all this in action? If you've been searching for actionable insights into applying AI solutions in hospitality, save your seat now to Apaleo’s live webinar on September 3rd with Stephan Wiesener, CTO of Apaleo, and me, Tiberiu Socaci, Co-Founder & CEO of Makeitfuture.
The guest experience
Guests interact with a chatbot on your website to inquire about their reservation status. The AI-enabled chatbot requests a booking code and email address for verification. Only when both pieces of information match, the chatbot provides comprehensive booking details, including stay duration, overall price, room and hotel amenities, and any other relevant information from the booking database. At the customer's request, it can also access and send the client's invoice to the email registered in the hotel's reservation system.
The chatbot backstage
To set up this system, you need several lego pieces that work together:
- Access to Apaleo’s API
- An OpenAI account (not the same as a ChatGPT account)
- A chatbot backend (we recommend Voiceflow)
- A no-code tool that binds everything together (we recommend Make)
Creating the specialized OpenAI Assistant
An OpenAI Assistant is like a GPT with superpowers. Using the OpenAI Platform, you will be able to create a version of ChatGPT that has a particular tone of voice, behaves according to a set of rules and has access to general information about your hotel and business. You can also play around with various parameters such as language model - you might choose between cheaper or more powerful - and temperature, which is responsible both for the creativity of responses, but also for mixing fiction with reality.
The next step is to empower your assistant with additional functionalities. After defining the AI Assistant's tone and behavior, you can connect it to other services like reservation systems or payment processors. These connections can be initiated through a feature called function calling, where the assistant decides on how to formulate the technical query and the parameters.
Thanks to Apaleo’s Swiss-knife hospitality APIs, there is no lack of choice for added functionality. For this demo, we've enabled the AI Assistant to connect to two Apaleo APIs: the booking and invoicing systems.
This assistant will be accessible by API, so that your clients and your team will not need an actual ChatGPT account to use the service.
Giving the assistant a friendly face
While OpenAI's Assistants provide powerful backend functionality, a client-facing interface is essential for a functional service. We created this demo using Voiceflow, a comprehensive builder for AI-powered chatbots. Voiceflow allows you to design visually appealing chat widgets and display them on your website quickly. You can customize colors, icons, avatars, and starting messages. Although Voiceflow offers tools to define chatbot conversation flow, we relied on the AI Assistant's prompt to shape the concierge's behavior in this demo.
One of Voiceflow's key features is its ability to send new messages to a webhook, effectively notifying the AI Assistant when its services are needed.
No-code: the glue that holds everything together
To bring together the AI assistant, chat interface, and booking and invoicing systems, we use Make.com, a no-code platform. Make.com provides a visual interface that allows users to connect various services as easily as assembling building blocks.
In our setup, the process flows designed in Make.com address two major challenges in AI chatbot use: the tendency to fabricate information (hallucinations) and the risk of exposing clients' personal data to unauthorized users.
To combat hallucinations, we created a process that allows the AI to retrieve live information from Apaleo's API about bookings. When a client requests specific booking information, the assistant activates its function calling and sends a query. Make.com then forwards this query to Apaleo, retrieves the information, and relays it back to the OpenAI Assistant. Its answer will be based on accurate data.
To protect customer data, the AI Assistant is programmed to respond only to customers who can provide two correct pieces of information: the booking reference and the email address. This security feature is implemented through our no-code interactions with the assistant. When the AI concierge requests an email from the customer, it triggers a function that checks reservations in Apaleo. Make.com returns Apaleo's response to the AI assistant, which then verifies that the reservation number matches the provided email before offering further booking information or sending an invoice.
AI + Apaleo + no-code open up a world of possibilities
Thanks to no-code technologies, this AI-powered concierge is remarkably easy to set up, providing accurate, instant, and secure hotel customer service within hours. With technology moving as fast as it does, no-code is a perfect solution to quickly adapt your systems and integrate the latest advances. When you have an idea, you cannot afford to wait for months or even years before a software development team transforms it into workable software. Companies like Makeitfuture can deliver it in days. If something needs fine-tuning or changing, the process is as easy as swapping one building block with another. And finally, it’s easier to train personnel into handling the most common errors in the no-code workflows, so they can easily keep everything running smoothly.
While managing reservations is just one aspect of what a hospitality assistant can do, Apaleo's API endpoints and AI technology open up a world of possibilities. You can expand the assistant's capabilities to create and confirm reservations during customer chats, handle check-in and check-out processes, process and verify credit card payments, and manage inventory. As you take your first steps with AI Assistants, you'll likely find yourself hungry to keep walking along the innovation path.
Join Apaleo and Makeitfuture on 3 September to see the AI concierge in action.
