At Goibibo, we are obsessed with our customers and we strive hard to ensure we are omnipresent, easily reachable, and give them best of the best travel experience. With 200 million people using WhatsApp in India every month, we thought sending air tickets, hotel booking confirmation, etc. on email or SMS might not be the only way to deliver value to our customers. To strengthen delivery of our e-tickets and vouchers, and to create an experience that is easy and more convenient for our customers, Goibibo is testing an integration with WhatsApp enterprise solution to send all the above and more on WhatsApp. You will no longer have to bear the inconvenience of combing your email or SMS to get hold of air tickets while standing in a busy airport entrance queue — your Goibibo air ticket is just a WhatsApp away.
You might be wondering why WhatsApp. For starters, a lot of people who started their internet journey with mobile feel more at home with WhatsApp than with email. WhatsApp has become second nature to a majority of the country, and is easy to use and accessible on mobile. Goibibo being a mobile-first company wants to leverage the mobile ecosystem to its fullest. With mobile, we can communicate better with our customers and also get feedback from them, which will help us deliver a better experience. To summarise, the ubiquity of WhatsApp will help us make travel a much better experience for our users.
For this test, we are beginning to send international air tickets on WhatsApp. Now, whenever you book an international flight, you have the option to receive your e-ticket right in a WhatApp message as an attached PDF document. We will ramp this up soon to domestic flight bookings, hotels, trains, etc. With Goibibo, your travel is just a WhatsApp away.
Trying out WhatsApp for travel was originally published in Backstage on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.