The travel and leisure industry is amongst the most competitive in the world, and companies are constantly looking for new methods to boost productivity and decrease expenses. In fact, there is a big shift happening at present, with an increasing number of travel, leisure and hospitality companies adopting Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automate key processes. Automation helps travel and leisure companies improve efficiency, accuracy, and compliance while also freeing up employees to focus on more value-added tasks.
And when you consider that research indicates that 67% of customers prefer self-service, it becomes apparent how ripe the travel and leisure sector is for implementing RPA.
Rémy Merckx, senior advisor, head of travel, leisure and hospitality at eClerx, explained, “Staffing shortages in the hospitality industry present a major challenge today in our operations.”
RPA, Merckx stressed, is a must strategy to support guest experiences and services optimization; Manage guest expectations and engagement, and improve staff quality of work and operations.
3 Benefits of RPA in the Travel and Leisure Industry
- RPA Boosts Employee Productivity
Many travel and leisure industry tasks, such as data entry, form filling, and website navigation, are time-consuming and repetitive. RPA can automate these tasks, freeing employees to focus on more value-added tasks. RPA can also help improve accuracy and compliance, as bots are less likely to make mistakes than humans.
- RPA Can Help to Improve Customer Satisfaction
Once employees are freed up from the mundane tasks that RPA can automate, they can provide a better service to customers. Re-deploying employees to higher-value tasks such as customer service and sales helps to not only improve customer satisfaction but also boosts employee morale.
- RPA Reduces Costs
RPA can help travel and leisure companies reduce costs in several ways. RPA bots can work 24/7, meaning tasks can be completed outside of regular working hours. RPA can also help improve efficiency and accuracy, which can lead to cost savings in the long term.
RPA Case Uses within the Travel & Leisure Industry
RPA can automate the entire booking process from beginning to end with little or no manual interaction. RPA can also be used to automatically send confirmation emails and texts to customers and update the hotel’s inventory management system.
Here’s how it works: RPA captures data from existing systems and then stores it in a central repository. From here, RPA can be used to automatically populate online booking forms, confirm bookings, and generate itineraries. This process is not only much faster than traditional methods, but it is also more accurate.
RPA bots can be used to proactively monitor customer behavior and preferences and then provide recommendations accordingly. It can also be used to automatically generate personalized itineraries based on customer feedback and reviews.
With factors like employee burnout becoming increasingly prevalent, RPA provides a welcome solution to the problem of employees having to carry out mundane and repetitive tasks.
Every day, hospitality workers must communicate with hundreds of consumers, with much of their time dedicated to common inquiries about the establishment and its procedures. “Do you have availability?” “What time is breakfast?” “Can I bring my pet?” and “Is there a refrigerator in my room?” are just a few examples of the types of questions hotel staff field daily.
With the implementation of an RPA solution like eClerx’s Roboworx, bots can be configured to handle the most frequently asked questions via chat or voice interface, allowing human employees to focus on more personalized tasks such as upselling room upgrades or amenities, handling customer complaints, and providing concierge services.
In this way, RPA not only helps to improve employee productivity but also enhances the customer experience.
RPA can also automatically update customers on changes in their booking, such as a room change or an extension to their stay. In addition, RPA can automate hotel tasks such as room service orders, laundry requests, and concierge services.
Case Study
One of the world’s leading bed banks that provides hotels with access to a network of B2B travel buyers such as tour operators, travel agents, airline websites, and more worldwide, decided to implement RPA. This company is a wholesaler of accommodation (rooms) that purchases rooms at a discounted price for specific dates in bulk and resells these to travel agencies, airlines, tour operators, and more.
The company utilized the automation capabilities of eClerx’s Roboworx because its existing web-based solutions could not handle competitor websites with dynamically-generated content or dynamic architectures. They were also more expensive to set up and required a longer lead time to configure websites for data crawling and analysis.
The result: 75 percent of the manual process is now automated, eight full-time employees’ production is now being done daily through automation, and the company reports 100 percent accuracy in competitor analysis.
Simply put, bots now do the once lengthy and manual process. And today, Roboworx’s GUI-based website configuration offers easy plug-and-play operation and seamlessly fits into the firm’s existing operational environment or back-end architecture.
Designed specifically for ultra-dynamic travel and leisure industry firms, the solution automated 75 percent of the manual process of comparing different travel e-commerce websites to analyze pricing and services.
As a result, Roboworx not only gathered data from the websites selected by the client but Roboworx also empowered the client with in-depth analysis and multiple auto-generated reports, enhancing the company’s operational efficiency.
Want to discover how your travel and leisure company can become the next RPA success story? Our experts are here to help pave the way. Take the first step to revolutionizing your operations by reaching out to our team today!
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