Intelligent suggestions while typing – Smart Search by wbe.travel

Intelligent suggestions while typing – Smart Search by wbe.travel

The newly launched wbe Smart Search offers you a personalized experience of searching travel products rapidly, exactly as you want. The Smart Search module replaces your default-searching feature with a quick, convenient one. The search you make in the engine is now even more precise and allows you to find the desired accommodation property faster than before.

Finding the needle in the digital hotels’ stack

Today’s travel businesses are overflowing with data from several sources, with a limitless supply of information and insights always seemingly within reach. Yet as the volumes of data grow, the challenge of locating the right accommodation property you need, when you need is only increasing – particularly across multiple channels, extranets, multiple suppliers connectivity, 3rd party partners, servers, various storage and so on.

Those long, unexciting searches for specific hotels or villas or other types of accommodations, can rapidly become time-consuming, expensive business, and harm your company’s efficiency and overall competitiveness, especially when facing directly the client, that wants to make now an instant search.

The latest technologies for the OTA-like feature

You can find this type of intelligent search feature, in one way or another, in the booking engines of the largest players in the travel market or world-renowned OTAs.

As per the technology part, we used Azure Cognitive Search for its cloud search service that offers a great, reliable infrastructure and the ideal tools for building a rich search experience. Moreover, the typeahead search capability or the rich indexing with smart text analysis were just some of the important capabilities that we were looking for when we started planning on enhancing the search in our booking system.

Increase your efficiency with fast, while typing retrieval of searched content

wbe.travel’s new Smart Search feature empowers you to find the relevant and precise accommodation choice within seconds without needing to conduct arduous searches within multiple pages and multiple filters. The feature localizes, indexes and extracts from multiple databases and narrows your search with intelligent suggestions offered in real-time, while you type. 

Sounds good but how does it really work?

In just three words: simple, accurate, flawless.
The intelligent feature searches the keywords typed by the user in multiple entities at the same time from the large library of data, hosted in the cloud. The library is different for each travel company, depending on the particular inventory sources they have, from directly contracted hotels, travel suppliers and third-party partners, or other sources.

Intelligent hints while typing

The search begins while the user is typing and the suggestions start appearing after writing just 3-4 characters, near the destination index. Those particular words formed while typing, are searched instantaneously in the back, in all 3 databases of hotels, destination, POI databases. This is how the user sees in real-time, as recommendations, several proposals for hotels or even destinations or POI that have those specific characters in their names. Moreover, the database where the feature searches are easily scalable, according to the portfolio you have now or decide to enrich at a later time.

Once you fill in the needed information such as period/dates, the number of people and rooms and you choose that specific hotel, POI or destination suggested near the search bar, you click search and the system automatically reroutes you to the needed results page. If you chose a specific hotel, you’ll be rerouted to its dedicated page for booking. If you chose a particular point of interest, it will automatically narrow down your search and show you only the accommodations near that POI. If you search for a specific destination, it will only show you the result in that destination.

Overall, wbe.travel’s Smart Search feature offers you intelligent suggestions, shown in the input for destination choice, to ease your browsing process, make the search quicker and be more productive than ever before.

A feature for all selling channels

Whether you choose to have it installed on your B2B or B2C, or on the Corporate or even on the Inhouse booking engine, the Smart Search feature will definitely help your resellers or your travelers in finding the needle in the digital hotels’ stack.
Thinking back on how the large corporation works, the Smart Search feature will help them make the booking in no time, creating an overall smooth process of rapidly finding what they desire. For corporations, as for all of us, time means money. So the quicker the operation the happier the client will be.

We would like to share with you a simple example, to understand better the added value brought by this feature. Most large companies sign in advance contracts with global hotel chains, to have preferential rates or special allotments. Therefore, when your corporate client logs in into the Corporate Booking Tool they need to make an instant booking for their pre-signed hotel chain. If they are unsure of the exact name of the hotel, they can simply type in the search box a few characters from that chain name and the desired destination. Several options will pop-up, as suggestions to ease their search.

The corporate doesn’t have the luxury of time to browse and have an endless search and this feature offers them exactly what they need – less time in the booking process. He needs a swift, instant process. Your corporate client can now easily search and book within 3 clicks the hotel, from the hotel chain portfolio, accepted by his company. The same situation is for the travel agents serving the corporate. He needs to be fast and flawless in offering his client the quote or directly the service.

Map it and then search it. Instantly

For the Smart Search to work wonders, it needs mapped content, at least for the hotels’ side if not, even more for the destinations. We advised and advocated our clients, even before we launched the Smart Search feature, to get their content mapped, to easily find the hotels or destinations.

If needed, wbe.travel is ready to help and provides an easy-to-use tool for manually mapping your hotels. Moreover, the great partnership that wbe.travel has with GIATA, the world-renowned company conducting professional mapping services, can help you get all your content mapped in no time.

We hope you’ll like the Smart Search feature and you’ll discover its effectiveness in growing the Total Turnover Value for your business.

For more information or a detailed demonstration of how the Smart Search feature works, contact us.