Telegram’s functionality has long gone beyond the scope of a conventional communication platform. Using the messenger, you can make audio and video calls, create secret chats, organize live broadcasts, conduct microblogging channels, broadcast your geolocation in real time, store an unlimited number of files in the cloud, and even edit media content – we talked about these and other features of the product earlier. However, the most interesting feature of Telegram — support for so-called bots, interactive web services that operate directly in the messenger and make it a universal tool for all occasions, including those related to travel and tourism.
Collage. Image source: pikisuperstar / freepik.com
Any tourist trip begins with purchasing tickets and booking tours. In the first case, the Travel Bot and Aviasales Cheap Tickets Bot will do a good job, in the second – Hot Trip Bot. With their help, it will not be difficult to set up a subscription to the chosen destination and purchase air tickets or a tour at a favorable price – the services monitor the offers available on the market around the clock and notify the user about the reduction in cost. The best thing for those who like to save money and not overpay.
When purchasing tickets for a large group and with many transfers along the way, confusion may arise with the documents in hand. A Telegram bot with artificial intelligence functions AviaGPT will help put things in order in such cases. It is enough to send him the purchased air tickets (can be in graphic file format): the program itself will extract the necessary data from them, record them and subsequently send reminders about upcoming flights with all the necessary information. AviaGPT can also save flight history, advise where to go and what to see in a new city, answer questions about travel and help with trip organization.
For those who often use air transport, we recommend bookmarking two more Telegram services – Flight Alerts and Flight Tracking. The first bot provides up-to-date information about flights, delays, cancellations and changes in flight schedules. To start the service and register in the system, you must specify the flight number and departure date. Flight numbers in IATA, ICAO and Codeshare formats are supported. As for the second bot, as you can easily guess from the name, it is designed to monitor the position of aircraft during flight at a given interval (from 5 minutes to an hour). Such a tool can be useful both for travelers and for people who want to be aware of the location of the plane on which one of their relatives, friends or colleagues is flying.
Continuing the theme related to aircraft, you cannot ignore the official bots of large Russian transport air hubs. Such virtual assistants are available to passengers at the airports Sheremetyevo (Moscow), Pulkovo (St. Petersburg), Domodedovo (Moscow), Vnukovo (Moscow), Sochi, Kazan, Emelyanovo (Krasnoyarsk) and many others. All of them allow you to subscribe to flights of interest, receive up-to-date information about changes in the schedule and other useful information (check-in counter number, flight status, boarding start time, boarding gate coordinates, baggage claim number, etc.).
If the travel route involves the use of not only air, but also other types of transport, then it would be logical to add the ChooChooBot bot to your contacts, which provides quick access to the current schedule of planes, trains, trains and buses. The service supports work in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Armenia, Abkhazia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Uzbekistan and Turkey.
Connoisseurs of leisurely walks through unfamiliar locations and independent excursions will be pleased with the Telegram services OpenTripBot and City Trip Bot. The first bot is designed to quickly search for interesting places and attractions nearby, the second is an audio guide with navigation functions on Google and Yandex maps. The OpenTripBot knowledge base covers the whole world; the geography of City Trip Bot is currently limited only to Russian settlements. If the excursion program includes visits to large cities, then we recommend installing the Taxi Watcher bot in reserve – it works in tandem with the Yandex Taxi service and, thanks to monitoring the cost of taxi services, allows you to save significantly when traveling around the city.
The GigaChat service developed by Sber can be of great benefit when preparing for a trip. The generative neural networks underlying it can help with collecting things for a trip to certain countries, gaining knowledge about the peculiarities of the mentality, traditions, customs of the people living in them and accepted forms of communication, creating a route to interesting places, making inquiries about those encountered along the way cultural heritage sites and resolve almost any emerging issues. GigaChat can also be used as a translator from one language to another, but if its capabilities suddenly turn out to be insufficient, you can always resort to a specialized Yandex Translate bot.
An important component of any long trip is collecting the necessary things, which are usually packed into suitcases and travel bags according to the principle “the main thing is not to forget anything.” The Chchecker bot can be a faithful assistant in such cases, allowing you to create to-do lists in the format of bulleted checklists and set reminders. Collaboration with lists in group chats is supported. Chchecker is built on the Telegram WebApps platform, and interaction with it is carried out as with a regular web application.
Traveling abroad typically entails significant costs for communication services, especially in countries where roaming is prohibitively expensive. In such cases, you can save money using the SIP.TG bot, which operates in conjunction with the VoIP gateway of the same name and allows you to set up forwarding of incoming phone calls to Telegram. It also makes sense to take a closer look at the Callcoin service, through which you can make international calls from the messenger at low prices and pay for communication services with the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. According to the developers, payment in Bitcoin ensures user confidentiality when working with the bot and develops the idea of Telegram as a secure communication platform. Another distinctive feature of the service is the use of Callback technology and classic telephone communication, rather than VoIP telephony.
Two more bots – Exchange Rates and TheLair Weather – can become faithful companions on a long journey that involves voyages across various countries and regions. What they are intended for follows from their names: the first allows you to convert monetary units from one currency to another online (sources of exchange rates can be selected in the service settings), the second shows a detailed weather forecast for 5 days in a specified location, including temperature, density clouds, precipitation, wind speed and direction, daylight hours and other information that may be useful when planning travel.
And finally, any trip is unthinkable without taking out an accident insurance policy. The “D2 Insurance” bot, created by the company of the same name, allows you to receive such a document using the Telegram messenger. We have not found any more developments of this kind offering services in the field of tourism, although previously there were much more of them. It is quite strange that insurance organizations ignore the idea of incorporating Telegram bots into their business processes and ignore such an effective tool for communicating with clients.
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