Sherpa

Inspiration

Older travelers with a passion for activity-specific trips are opting to journey alone, even when that means leaving a significant other at home. Solo travelers make up one-third to one-half of every group on our U.S. tours. Most of these solo travelers are female, but don’t assume they’re single; they may be married but traveling alone, or with one or several friends.

Some interesting notes...

80% of all travel decisions are made by women regardless of:

who they travel with
who pays for the trip
or where they go

Women’s market exceeds $19 trillion annually. 39 percent of American women plan on taking one in the next three years.

So we created a chatbot with them in mind, with the goal to reduce the initial effort through a conversational search.

What it does

Recommend hotel options to female solo traveler via Facebook chat, based on personalized amenities preferences.

How we built it

The application is a Facebook chatbot, which is great to target very specific user profile.

We utilized Smooch.io framework.

Then we put a layer on top with Microsoft LUIS to make it intelligent through Natural Processing Language.

The results we display come from Sabre API Soap.

Challenges we ran into

We got familiar with new technologies during this event. We struggled to filter amenities presented on Sabre API. Learn on the go, we needed to move at speed to meet the deadline.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

We were able to integrate new technologies we weren’t awared of. The last minute addition of Microsoft LUIS cognitive services to make the bot smarter.

What we learned

New technologies and how to efficiently mixing them into a single application.

Sabre API's Used

OTA_HotelAvailRQ
GetHotelImage
CreateSession

What’s next for Sherpa

Sabre Red Workspace Integration.
Agencies to create and target niche profiles i.e. pet travelers, eco-travelers...
Web app interface to search, view results, and save favorites hotels.# sabre-ttx