RPA in the Hospitality Industry

How Robotic Process Automation is Influencing the Hospitality Industry

Hospitality businesses repeat the same back-office tasks every day: updating room availability, checking rates, matching invoices. Robotic process automation (RPA) can take over much of that routine work.

Below we explain what RPA is and how it works, then look at its benefits and use cases in the hospitality industry.

What Is RPA?

Robotic process automation is rule-based software. It runs software robots (bots) that repeat the steps a person takes in IT systems: logging in, copying data between applications, filling in forms, generating reports.

RPA makes sense when employees spend much of their time on repetitive, rule-based tasks. Bots take those tasks over, and staff move to work that needs judgement.

We covered the wider case for automation in our article on trends in the hospitality industry.

Need process automation software for your business? Contact us.

How does RPA work?

When Go Wombat builds RPA software for a business, setup has two stages: training and operation. Training shows your employees how the software works and how it changes their workflow. In operation, the bots run the tasks they were configured for.

Your staff do not need specialist skills to use it: the software should have a simple interface and step-by-step instructions.

RPA can function in two ways

Attended

An employee controls the bots and starts and stops them manually, usually from their own workstation as part of a task.

Unattended

Bots run without human intervention. Employees set up the initial configuration, including the schedules or triggers that start and stop the bots.

Benefits Of Robotic Process Automation In the Hospitality Industry

Revenue management

Bots can collect booking, rate and occupancy data from different systems into regular reports, so revenue managers work from current figures.

Flexible scheduling

Unattended bots can run routine tasks on a schedule, for example overnight, so these tasks do not take staff time during busy hours.

Personalised experience

Bots can pull guest data from booking, CRM and point-of-sale systems into one profile, so staff know a returning guest's preferences before arrival.

Cost reduction

When bots handle routine tasks, fewer staff hours go into manual data entry and checking, which lowers operating costs.

Convenient booking process

RPA can automate routine booking steps. For example, if a room is free on the requested dates, the booking can be confirmed without an employee stepping in.

Better use of customer data

Bots can collect and clean customer data from different systems, so marketing and sales teams work from complete profiles when they segment audiences and plan campaigns.

Cross-selling and upselling

RPA can support cross-selling and upselling by sending offers when a booking matches set rules. Cross-selling means offering additional items along with the main purchase: for example, a guest who books a room gets a discount at the hotel restaurant or spa. Upselling means persuading the customer to buy something additional or at a higher cost, such as a room upgrade.

Contact Go Wombat to build custom RPA software.

Robotic Process Automation Use Cases In The Hospitality Industry

Here are five common uses of RPA in hospitality.

Booking

RPA bots handle the rule-based parts of booking: checking availability, entering reservations from email or partner channels into the property management system, and sending confirmations. Chatbots that talk to guests and machine learning models that analyse their preferences are separate tools, though they can pass data to RPA bots.

Automated booking cuts the time guests wait for a confirmation. Bots can also send promotional offers when a booking matches set rules.

Pricing Analysis

Before you set prices, you need to know what competitors charge. Bots can collect competitors' published rates on a schedule and put them into a report, so your staff do not have to check them by hand.

Loyalty Processing

Bots can update loyalty points after each stay, collect reviews from different platforms in one place and route them to the right team.

Analysing guest behaviour to find patterns is a job for machine learning or analytics tools, not RPA. The two can be combined: bots collect the data, and the models analyse it.

Regulatory Compliance Monitoring

If your business processes confidential data of users located worldwide, it is necessary to comply with all regulations which act in specific regions. For example, when you process data of EU-based citizens, your business must comply with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In addition, there are some data privacy acts in the US, and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is one of them. So you must ensure compliance with regulations of all regions where you work.

RPA bots can run the routine auditing and reporting steps and notify you whether compliance checks have been completed.

Claims Processing

When a guest files a claim, your staff check that it falls within company policy and then decide whether to settle or reject it.

A bot can collect the claim details, check them against policy rules and prepare the case. People should still make the final decision to settle or reject, because it needs judgement. The process gets faster, and staff spend less time on paperwork.