The Top 5 Tasks To Automate In Travel
(based on the main tasks that we see your competitors implementing)
Today there are so many ways of bringing automation into your business to deliver cost savings and make your teams more effective and error-free. However, many travel businesses are still unsure where to start. Here’s a simple guide as to what we see as the six quick wins that you should automate to stay competitive:
1. Invoice Matching
When bookings begin to flood in, yet more documents need to be processed or ‘matched with your system’. Automating the invoice-matching process, from inbox to payment, allows your team to focus their limited human effort only on the exceptions. This reduces the risk of errors by 98% - finance teams can now breathe a huge sigh of relief. It also allows you to cope with peaks and troughs more effectively and improve turnaround times.
2. Bookings made off the system
Many businesses book holiday components not through the booking system but need to manually purchase them through the supplier’s site and then manually copy the confirmation details back. This is typically due to a special rate that your company has or if the supplier is just not available on the system. It then takes error-prone effort to import the booking details back onto your system. This process can be fully automated with a confirmation wizard.
3. Flight Schedule Changes
When flight times are changed, a process needs to take place to update your system and inform the customer, if needed. This manual process can be automated and will save hours of wasted effort for teams. Now you can leave this process up to the robots when they are triggered by the flight change.
4. Booking Checks
Travel retailers typically check that holiday bookings are correctly booked, and this can be a long-winded and laborious task for teams. When this process is automated, it leaves teams with the freedom to just investigate the errors – the bookings that need amending, not the correct ones. It also uncovers more errors than human effort alone.
5. Reporting
Most businesses, not just travel businesses, require standard and advanced reporting so the exec team is well informed on its performance, and where to focus efforts to improve. BI teams spend a lot of time and effort collecting data and generating reports for this. When this process is automated, you can have real-time advanced reports scheduled at your fingertips – so you’re ready all the time, any time.
There are so many admin tasks within travel that can be automated, saving you time, money, effort, resource – you name it. Imagine the possibilities and what you and your teams can focus on when removing the long-winded and laborious tasks from your workload.
