Top 5 Use Cases for Machine Translation in Travel, Hospitality and Retail

As part of our AI and personalization blog series we're taking a closer look at how translation, specifically machine translation, can be used in the retail, travel and hospitality industries. From the previous Insights we’ve shared, it's clear that buyers like to get information in their own language. And we know that offering glocalized content highly increases the chance of a customer purchase.

We also know that efficiently and effectively translating a mass of content through human translation can be costly, both time and investment wise. But here is where AI powered Machine Translation (MT) is a perfect solution for delivering a glocalized customer experience.

E-commerce portals have already found the immense commercial value in providing product descriptions and catalogs in multiple languages. And as the travel and hospitality giants catch on, offering translated content could be a huge growth point for a ton of companies.

Travel aggregation sites are generally more preferred than individual airline or hotel sites themselves, with Expedia, SkyScanner and the Priceline Group (booking.com, kayak) included among the top used sites. With most international tourists coming from Mexico, Brazil, Germany, France, China, Japan and Korea, just here each site needs to be operating in seven different languages! Developing a strategy to produce rapid and high volume translated content is critical to gaining and maintaining customers and market dominance.

Not all content can be AI generated or Machine Translated but here are 5 cases of where MT is worth its weight in gold:

1. Structured Content: Hotel descriptions for "budget" or "stock" hotels. MT is a solid solution to get these into all the languages a hospitality company needs. Most hotels offer the same things so as long as MT is learning and capturing memories from translations then it is a reliable tool. Save big on time and investment with AI generated content and MT of all your structured content.

2. Unstructured Content: Hotel or tourist site reviews written by customers are extremely important to company reputation. MT works here because the quality of the translation is not so critical, as long as the main points come across in the translations. More good reviews in more languages mean more purchasing customers.

3. Blogs: Some hotel branches or booking sites are starting their own blogs with travel guides, tips and tricks and info about everything from restaurants to cultural events to where to shop in the place they're visiting. Getting these blogs translated quickly and easily using MT will attract all these new travelers to your city/country/hotel/booking site in general. Especially because less than 25% of internet users are native English speakers.

4. Community Forums: Another way to keep a global customer base engaged with each other is providing translated forum topics and discussions. While making customers feel at home using "glocalization" you can also connect them with other users not speaking their language who may have more expertise in the given topic. Speakers of all languages can benefit from the shared information when translated.

5. Live Chats: Consumers now want instant communication available online at any moment and prefer online chat platforms to get their questions answered rather than a telephone call. MT can help here too. It provides customer service in any language instantly and costs a lot less than providing a multilingual call center. It takes 20 languages to reach 80% of the online population and customer service is another cornerstone of building a reliable and long-lasting company.

When offering content in multiple languages draws new customers in, it is a powerful step to take when moving your brand to the global stage. As an MT engine learns and improves it requires less human-quality post editing to make sure that content has been "glocally" and properly translated. Save time and money translating a mass of suitable content with Machine Translation to create the content any global company can be proud to share with the world.