Hotelbeds, the world’s leading bedbank, has announced the launch of a chatbot feature called Bedsy that will be available to Hotelbeds and Bedsonline clients.

This news follows the successful launch of ‘Livechat’ at the beginning of the year. Livechat puts clients in direct contact with their local Contact Centre in a much faster way than before, creating a real-time, one-to-one relationship via a web chat function.

Bedsy is a chatbot that can provide the status of booking queries or provide a supplier confirmation number all in real time and whilst attending an unlimited number of customers simultaneously.

Bedsy can also point clients in the right direction for many other day-to-day booking requests and queries, such as how to send a special request to the hotel or provide links to access hotel information.

Both Livechat and Bedsy form part of ‘SelfSeT’, a newly launched self-service toolkit from Hotelbeds designed to help clients resolve their most common queries in the fastest and most convenient way possible.

The SelfSeT toolkit will provide new tools to help clients save time and effort when managing bookings with Livechat and Bedsy are the first tools available. Further planned launches will include a Reservations Help Desk, a Reservation Management Portal for API clients, an automated phone support platform, and a range of new functionalities and improvements to the booking engine.

Bedsy and Livechat are already available to more than 60,000 client partners Hotelbeds and Bedsonline are working with around the world – including travel agents, tour operators, airlines, and points redemption schemes – with the exception of Japan and China. By automatically responding to clients’ queries Bedsy is able to save valuable time for clients and maximise the efficiency of Hotelbeds’ Contact Centres.

Marc Albert, Global Operations Director at Hotelbeds, commented: "We listened to our clients and recognised that they wanted to reduce operational costs and boost efficiency, so we’ve created Bedsy to respond to those needs.

"Bedsy will maximise the efficiency of our customer care teams and save a lot of the time clients currently spend resolving their most common queries, not least as 35 per cent of calls we receive are just to re-confirm hotel bookings.

"Equally Livechat means our Contact Centre agents are instantly accessible to our clients and thus can handle customers’ enquiries quicker."

"Our main objective is to offer the best customer experience and we strongly feel that with the launch of Bedsy and Livechat – along with other SelfSeT tools in development – we are delivering the best possible customer care in our sector."