Thanks a lot @misbahspeaks for posting about Waylo. Let me give you a brief background about Waylo.
Last year, I traveled 40+ weekends and realized travel booking is frustrating. None of the existing apps even remember my travel preferences despite booking with them every week. So, we got down to building something that we would use ourselves.
Do you also think travel booking is a pain and a frustrating time drain? What if you had a personal AI travel assistant that worked for free? Meet Waylo.
Waylo can book any hotel for you with just one text and 3 taps. Just type in when and where you are traveling, select hotel and preferred room type and tap to pay. As you book hotels, Waylo will learn your preferences and simplify the booking process.
There is no need to worry about price comparisons. We guarantee better prices than you see online or you get an automatic 10% refund. Last month, our beta users saved 12.4% compared to the lowest online prices.
Btw, to celebrate our March 7 launch, we are giving USD 15 off the first booking (of USD 75 or more) to the first 0307 Hunters booking a hotel in the next 37 hours.
Interesting and i'm testing it to see if it is 'competitive' because there are lots of players in this fields and so far none have been consistently great on the pricing front... of course 3 clicks sounds nice but not at the cost of too great a price delta..
Just testing the website version at the moment.. why the backwards date? -
for U.S. customers, 2017-03-31 feels weird, it should be 03/31/2017 order wise...
@exlemor Excellent point Emmanuel. Part of our 3 clicks/taps goal is to earn your trust that Waylo will not dupe you on pricing. As part of that goal, we automatically re-check our prices after booking and issue a 10% refund if some other site offers a better price.
We have been experimenting a lot on the dates. 03/31 and 31/03 are both confusing to some part of the world. So, for the display, we are currently experimenting with 2017-03-31. But might change that depending on feedback. On a side note, our NLP understands both formats but is sometimes confused for something like 03/04. or 03.04.
@kyunbit Why can't you pick up the person's browser location and IP and make the data layout adjustment automagically...
[I realize it won't be 100% correct but still way better than the current option].
On a different point, now that I have played around with the system...
the slight advantage of the 3 clicks and the slightly better pricing are honestly lost on how slow/inefficient/cumbersome the process is to get to a place where you can book a hotel... additionally, after the chatbot asked me its questions, it had to transfer me to Raju - a live agent which took even more time...
So, while yes - the pricing with a bit better, it took over 7 minutes with Waylo vs under 1 minute 20 seconds to find something on Booking.com [1 minute 18 seconds] and Kayak.com [1 minute 04 seconds] and there was way more information readily available on both of these platforms about the hotel/filters, etc...
I realize/assume this is an early version but the workflow of questions of the bot really needs some improvements...
Holler if you want some help!
Cheers,
Emmanuel
@exlemor Thanks a lot. This is a goldmine. Have connected with you on Twitter to talk about it further.
I am aware that the process is overall slower when a live agent has to step in. Happens when the bot has errors or the conversation is too long. We have cut down our live takeovers by ~2X in the last month and there's still scope for improvement.
I am excited to learn more about your insights on the workflow and also the timing comparisons you made. On a laptop/big screen, the visual display is way better than a conversational interface. On a smartphone, I find accessing and modifying filters is cumbersome. For example selecting just the 4+ star hotels filter on kayak app takes 5 taps and that is where I believe a conversational interface can shine. However, it does have a small learning curve.
@exlemor I see. However, as you pointed out; there is still a lot of scope for improvement of the workflow. I should also mention that the price discount are typically 10-30% compared to Expedia etc. The maximum I have seen is 75%.
Waylo: Hotel Price Prediction
Waylo: Hotel Price Prediction
Waylo: Hotel Price Prediction
Waylo: Hotel Price Prediction
Waylo: Hotel Price Prediction
Waylo: Hotel Price Prediction