One of the world’s leading digital travel management companies operating with 18,000+ travel professionals and managing over 100 corporate events per day.
For a global TMC customer that was more than 60-year-old and had a presence in over 160 countries, airline bookings were the mainstay. Consequently, agents ended up spending most of their day and attention on managing these bookings and following them up with a host of time-consuming manual processes. These included printing invoices, sending bookings and updating mid- as well as back-office systems. Hotel bookings were low on the priority list, because they involved even more time-consuming processes. The TMC needed to increase agent productivity levels while booking hotel and tap into opportunities that were being missed, because the hotel booking process was proving to be tedious.
Multiple manual processes
Labour intensive booking operations
Different platforms for GDS & non GDS listing
Missed booking opportunities
Agents chose what was more efficient to manage. Airline bookings are accessed through the GDS and are process-driven. The agent gets most of what’s needed in one place. Hotel bookings took longer – it involved the agent identifying a hotel booking opportunity for every airline booking, searching for optimum rates and hotels for each booking and making the hotel booking. The agent had to scout multiple platforms to search for the best and most relevant hotel rates. Given the time already spent on airline bookings, agents chose to pay attention to those bookings, leading to missed opportunities in hotel reservations.
Hotel bookings on the TMC’s existing system were managed through multiple GDS and non-GDS channels, which meant manual back-and-forth for an agent between the channels to manage everything. Clearly, what the agent needed was a more efficient way to manage hotel bookings seamlessly between the channels and streamlined processes that would make it easy for the agent to tap into new hotel booking opportunities.
HotelHub created a single platform that integrates all GDS and non-GDS hotel listings, bookings and management in one place. All channels were available on the HotelHub platform, but more importantly, it factored in each TMC and Corporate Traveller policy, ensuring a streamlined process and automated capture of accounting data. Using the platform, the agent can now automatically and immediately identify a hotel booking opportunity and the availability for each airline booking. The paperwork is also automated, so the agent spends less time on manual processes. Travel policies, filtered by TMC or corporates, are configured in the system – it displays only valid bookings. All active and passive segments of a PNR and accounting line remarks were automated. Payments, faxes and mails were also integrated into the system, making the entire system smooth and highly efficient for the agent.
Once the HotelHub platform was deployed across the TMC’s organisation, agent productivity increased by 20%. The agents also no longer forgo any hotel booking opportunities.
Increased agent productivity with intutive and intelligent hotel booking solution and interface
