Opportunities and Pitfalls
Robotic process automation (RPA) is a new technology that uses software with AI and machine learning skills to capture, analyse, and automate high-volume, repetitive operations that were previously completed manually. RPA gives businesses the ability to efficiently automate labor-intensive tasks, optimist workflows, boost staff productivity, and ultimately provide happy customers.
The hotel sector is being disrupted in many different ways by digital revolution. As the hotel sector changes its offerings, products, services, and infrastructure to meet the needs of the digital era, the way clients use hospitality services is changing significantly. Data management, reservations, processes, and systems make up the high-volume transaction-based environment that is the hospitality sector. RPA is emerging as a leading technology that has the potential to upend hotel management and operations. Bookings for hotels, restaurants, and other leisure activities, cashiering at the front desk, financial reconciliation, loyalty programmes, and employee rosters, for instance, may all be affected by RPA. The integration of chatbot services with booking and purchase will create a new notification channel for visitors. Another major emphasis will be on rewarding loyalty with simple award redemption. As hotels extend their involvement in the industry, they will actively collaborate with other providers.
Bookings
RPA offers a lot of potential for use in the booking and purchase processes. By virtualizing the entire booking process from beginning to end with little to no manual intervention, it decreases the cost of service through automation. RPA also significantly lowers the price of transaction and itinerary processing over the long term, saving travel agencies a lot of money. With RPA, hoteliers can devote more time to offering first-rate guest services and less time to processing data.
Financial reconciliation
For every organisation, financial reporting is a crucial task. However, creating and disseminating these reports requires a lot of work and poses a significant risk in the event of failure or mistakes. In order to generate reports for finance, HR, or taxes, RPA or a bot can be employed. The bot can gather data from a variety of legacy systems, including ERP and data warehouses. Then, using workflow management to enable a hassle-free procedure and error-free compliance that can be supported by visible audit trails, this aggregated data can be reconciled using pre-defined reporting templates. Due to the RPA systems’ constant availability, reporting time can be greatly decreased.
Chatbot services
For visitors, RPA chatbots will be able to create a separate channel for reservations and notifications. Booking bots may be able to not only complete reservations but also upsell rooms and specials in line with guests’ tastes because they are based on text exchanges with call centre agents and website browsing pathways.