· Revenge Travel has helped the hospitality industry rebound back to its Pre -Covid Level activity
· In this post, we’ll learn how hospitality leaders can manage the surge in business due to revenge travel
· How AI plays a role in enhancing customer experience in the hospitality industry
65% of Americans are planning leisure trips within the next six months according to MMGY Travel Intelligence, a global marketing and research company
Among Europeans, 70% are planning vacation trips till November 2022, according to an ETC survey.
Mastercard says bookings on short and medium-haul flights have surpassed pre-pandemic levels.
And travel searches for the first quarter of 2022 were above their 2019 levels, according to Google, while searches for passport appointments jumped 300% in the first three months of this year.
For the uninitiated, Revenge Travel means “a new unbridled demand for vacations that are more frequent, more indulgent, and—more than anything—far from home”, according to Time Magazine.
The surge in tourism across countries has pushed the hospitality industry to look for solutions to plug the staff shortage gap, technology upgrades, and offer customers an excellent experience.
Enterprises of all sizes have used the last two years to upgrade their facilities and services. Many hotels have automated customer-facing services like check-ins or even reduced the frequency of once routine services.
“Inflation and staff shortages is the twin-headed monster threatening the travel recovery this summer,” says Tourism Economics’ Goodger.
While hospitality leaders can’t do much about inflation, they can certainly address the staff shortage by employing digital workers or bots.
Suppose the predictions about revenge travel come true. In that case, the hospitality sector will have a sudden surge in clientele and an insufficient workforce to manage back-office operations like AP (Account payables) and Bank Recon, among others.
What do hospitality back-office operations encompass?
Back-office operations are company processes that are composed of non-client-facing functions and personnel. Back-office functions include settlements, clearances, record maintenance, regulatory compliance, accounting, and IT services.
Why are back-office operations necessary?
Back-office operations can negatively impact the hospitality enterprise’s brand image if not executed well.
1. Unavailability of basic amenities due to delayed payments can make your guest ratings drop
2. Delayed payments due to the slow manual process can break vendor relationships
3. Generations of refunds due to cancellations must be addressed promptly to ensure good service.
4. The manual process doesn’t include fraud detection, which drains a good portion of the hotel revenue.
5. Manual Processing of forms can lead to costly errors and consume a lot of time.
6. The manual nature of the work also inhibits scalability.
Intelligent Automation solutions can help hospitality leaders manage back-office operations with minimal human intervention. RPA and IPA (Robotic Process Automation and Intelligent Process Automation) solutions can help quicken the hospitality back-office processes like Bank Recon, which involves extensive manual effort.
RAP’s content intelligence solution, RAPFlow, eliminates the bottlenecks that come with manual data entry and verification. It can extract relevant fields from captured forms and structure the content into a meaningful format through its entity extraction capabilities.
It uses robust signature pattern recognition and image processing capabilities.
RAPFlow is a highly scalable, cloud-based solution that seamlessly integrates into pre-existing systems with one-time training.
AI-powered RAPflow can help hospitality enterprises to increase efficiency, scale at will and reduce errors in back-office operations. You can even build your own use case, and the platform can easily integrate with the existing systems.
While back-office operations may not seem as exciting as front-office hospitality operations, it is essential to keep them running smoothly to build a brand image synonymous with good service, reliability, and trust.
Suggested Read: Are You ‘in the dark’ About Your Hospitality Night Audits?
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