Kayak Adds a Bot to Slack to Expand Booking Via Messaging Apps
Skift Take
Give Kayak credit for going where the users are and building a travel-search app on top of Slack. Is Slack the optimum way to plan a trip? Hardly. But there will be some users, who are chatting at the office in Slack all day, who could find it convenient. Messaging apps such as WhatsApp would be fertile ground as well.
In earlier days it was websites, then smartphones and now messaging apps -- travel companies build products where the users are.
Thus Kayak, using natural language processing, has developed flight and hotel search in workplace-chat app Slack. Numerous companies both inside and outside of travel are building apps on top of Slack and other chat and messaging services. Slack boasts 2.3 million daily active users just over a year after launching.
