How many times has it happened that you had to sit cramped up in middle seat because the counter lady told that’s the only option available? Or you have to sit a few rows away from your family on the same airplane journey?
We, at Goibibo constantly strive to make entire travel experience wonderful and memorable. Though travellers were able to book their favorite flights on Goibibo at awesome prices, not getting the desired seats made the whole experience little sour; and affected our NPS too! We wondered, all OTAs have seat selection flows for some time now, then why??
The Product Problem
While everyone like to research a lot to book desired flights at great deals, seat booking is more a mundane task. Post your flight booking, the whole process of logging in, going to “My bookings”, seeing the seats, reserving a seat is a multi step process and only few really enter that funnel. How do we solve this for 95% of our users?
Goibibo has been investing heavily on AI & conversational platforms for sometime now. Read our CTO’s vision here. Through our GIA (In-house intelligent conversational bot) & “Whatsapp for Business” (read here), we already have made things like post bookings queries, e-ticket delivery, hotel reviews much easier.
So, we decided to go the conversational way; thinking Goibibo as the perfect concierge for the traveller. What if a simple message comes in your Whatsapp telling “Your preferred seats are filling fast, reserve yours now?”
The Design Problem
In a conversational design approach, the limitations of Whatsapp pushed the team to innovate. There were 4 major problems/limitations we had to solve;
1. Show the entire layout on screen without any redirections
2. Demarcate the different categories of paid seats (Yes front of airplane Aisle is expensive than the rear one)
3. Limit the number of user inputs (To as low as single word reply for free seat!)
4. Make a scalable design (A320 vs A380?)
After a lot of iterations, some design magic happened(Thanks conversational design guru Astha Goel):



Results
Seat bookings increased 5X in the first few days after going live.

Road Ahead
Currently we are live for Indigo bookings, team is working to make all major domestic and international airlines live real quick.
Next time you book tickets with Goibibo, sit back and relax. Your favorite Aisle seat is just a Whatsapp message away!
P.S: Kudos to rockstar team of Goibibo Astha Dixit amit gupta sharath kpa for thinking customer first and executing this beautifully.
Booking your favorite airplane seat — The Goibibo way! was originally published in Backstage on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.