How automation helps with hotel online reservation processes?

Find out which 3 automation elements your hotel needs for business management and how they will help you not only to prospect, but also to automate and improve online booking processes.

There are many challenges currently facing the hotel and tourism industry. One of these challenges has clearly been the huge loss of visitors due to the pandemic. But this problem is not isolated. When countries allowed tourists to enter their territories, many hotels lacked the workflows to reach out to people. 

It is at this time that many hotels have seen the opportunity to consider the adoption of automating business processes, including, specifically, within the commercial areas.

In this blog we will address the following topics: 

• The importance of process automation in the hotel industry.
• How to automate your online booking processes.
• The 3 main elements that every hotel needs to automate and improve customer management.

The importance of process automation in the hotel industry.

The most obvious reason is because marketing today is not just about creating channels or digital islands to handle requests. It is about automating customer management and business processes through workflows that optimise these flows.

It makes a lot of sense to automate a process in any company, in the case of the hotel industry, one of these that can be very important is online booking. This is due to the fact that there has been a high loss of customers.

How to automate your online booking processes?

• The Customer Journey of our customer.
• The areas for improvement within the process, in this particular case, reservations.
• The development of automation in the process chain.

The 3 main elements that every hotel needs to automate and improve customer management.

Automation is not an extremely difficult process, but it requires understanding first, which business rules apply. To understand the sequence of processes, it is required to develop a line of automated actions. These are as follows:

• Implementation of an omnichannel CRM within your digital business architecture: By unifying the different points of contact with customers, this influences their experience, by being able to manage their requests through an omnichannel platform, the traceability of the contact maintained with the hotel, their reservation requests, information provided, among other areas of interest, is not lost.

• Creation of personalised email templates: These are directed as an automatic response to customers, prior to booking and at the time of making a reservation.
• Creation of workflows for the management of reservations: When a reservation is made, usually the customer contacts the executive by phone or email. But if this process loses traceability, this is when using workflows becomes a solution.

Here are two real-life examples of workflow automation for hotels created within the HubSpot platform, examples of check-in reservation and check-out confirmations.

Check-In Reservation:

Check-Out Confirmation:

Source of the developer of the Workflows: Imagineer.

When creating workflows, your conditions may vary depending on the type of platform. Not all of them have automation, so this is an important aspect to consider.

Within HubSpot, as can be seen in the image above, there is the possibility of generating workflow automation.  For this, the following conditions must be defined: 

• The workflow trigger: The initial triggers are in charge of establishing the initial criteria that will trigger the workflow. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out a process of analysis of the areas to be automated. For this case of reservations, the contact property is entered and confirmation of the customer's check-in and check-out is sought.
• Establish next step tracking: Apply customised email templates, scheduled time delays, internal notifications to the team and to simplify steps, enrol within an active simultaneous workflow to manage customer check-in and check-out actions.

If you are interested in learning more about how to automate your hotel's business processes and improve the customer experience, schedule a meeting with our team.