It's December and we're feeling festive - but improving the platform doesn't stop just because it's party season. Read on for what we've been building lately... And as per usual, if you're a Triptease customer you can follow the full list everything we're doing by clicking on the Updates tab in the Triptease Platform. But we're sharing a selection of our latest updates here too because we're nice like that.

Auto-responses for unattended guests

Product: Front Desk - Date: Wednesday 20th December

Working in a hotel requires constant multitasking, so we do everything we can to help hoteliers stay on track. This week we’ve added a new feature to Front Desk that will handle unattended guests for you when you’re attention is needed elsewhere.

If a guest has asked a question and been waiting one minute and 15 seconds for a response, we’ll send an automated message asking them to leave their email address and explaining that we will let them know when an agent replies.

When a Front Desk agent replies to the guest from inside the Agent Portal, we’ll then send an email to the guest with a copy of the message, inviting them to return to the hotel website and continue the conversation with the agent who is now available.

As per usual - if you have any questions or comments about this update then please do get in touch. We love to hear your feedback!

Training our AI-assisted Front Desk chatbot

Product: Front Desk - Date: Friday 15th December

Front Desk is built for busy hoteliers, which is why we’re doing everything we can to make chatting with guests online as quick, simple and intuitive as possible. We want to build a chat tool that knows what your guests are likely to ask, and can suggest the most helpful response instantly. That’s why right now we’re in the process of training our chat functionality to understand multiple variations of every question a hotelier might be asked by a guest.

Previously, the chatbot has only been able to learn from genuine guest questions that have come in via Front Desk, but we wanted to speed the process up and teach the chatbot new phrases and questions ourselves. This week we’ve put some code in place that allows us to do just that.

We will now be able to train the chatbot to understand much more complex information, for example that swimming pools don’t just have physical properties like depth and length - they also have schedules, opening times and activities.

Similarly, the chatbot will begin to understand that different combinations of words can be used to ask the same question, so that it can then recall related content from a previous conversation. For example, if the chatbot is asked a variation of ‘Do you serve a full English breakfast’ it will now know that it could be helpful to provide additional information, like the price and the time that breakfast is available, instead of just answering ’Yes’.

This is just the beginning of what our AI-assisted chat will be able to to, so if you have any questions or suggestions for the Front Desk team then please do get in touch!

Integration FAQs to help your tech team

Product: Price Check - Date: Thursday 7th December

As with any integration, there are certain questions that seem to pop up again and again when hotels are integrating with the Triptease platform. We thought we’d make it easier for your tech team to self-serve the answers they’re looking for with the introduction of some specific Integration FAQs.

And they’re not just useful during your go-live process. Having access to clear integration documentation will be helpful if you’ve made changes to your website that mean modifications to Triptease’s integration are required as a result. Going back to basics and looking at how your integration should be implemented can help get Triptease tools back up and running on your website faster.

If you're a Triptease customer head to the Product Updates page for a link to the integration FAQs - and if there’s something missing that you’d like to see just get in touch and let us know.