How RPA Impacts The Travel And Tourism Industry

As the number of international travel options increases, the services offered by professional travel agents have grown as well. Tourists consult travel companies for a personalized travel experience. Moreover, they rely on their travel agents to provide details about their destination’s passport and visa requirements, pick new vacation destinations, and get a hotel that satisfies their demands.

Due to the increased number of outbound travel and the service of travel agents, non-optimized business operations continue to delay small to medium-sized travel agencies. To make their processes more efficient, many of these agencies utilize robotic process automation (RPA) to manage their customer services, improve their entire value chain, and deal with their most critical challenges within the industry.

With that in mind, read on to learn more about RPA and how it impacts the travel and tourism industry.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

RPA is the process of utilizing computer software systems—known as ‘robots’—to manage repetitive tasks. These robots deal with applications and data sources nearly the same way team members in the travel and tourism industry do. They can perform almost any rule-based task through engagement with any website or software application. Apart from helping a company achieve efficiency and cost savings, employing RPA on everyday tasks can also enable travel agencies to focus on high-level business priorities.

Furthermore, as RPA takes over the regular manual tasks, it eliminates the possibility of human error. That’s why customers can expect better-performing, personalized services from businesses that utilize this automation.

Impacts Of RPA On Travel And Tourism Industry

The growth of the travel and tourism industry has empowered many entrepreneurs to venture into travel enterprises providing a wide range of services, such as online ticketing, travel planning, and management of booking cancellations. Most of these travel companies operate online, predominantly relying on company websites and applications for growing sales. 

Accordingly, travel companies are encountering heavy website traffic, which has compelled them to use RPA systems to manage website information. With the utilization of RPA in dealing with databases, travel agents have more time to focus on innovative services and strategies to grow their business.

Furthermore, here are some of the real-world use cases for RPA in the travel and tourism industry:

• Better Regulatory Compliance

Travel companies must keep higher levels of security to abide by increasing border security management and tightening travel rules and requirements nationally and internationally. Also, customers must hold valid and updated passports and visas depending on their desired travel destinations.

Since most platforms support these airline regulations, the RPA systems comply with these measures by handling travel customers’ booking and information. Then, they save these customers’ data in a central logging system where travel agencies can regularly monitor them, access them in the event of audits, and update them to reflect the changes in travel rules and requirements. RPA performs all repetitive compliance tasks and minimizes the risk of travel companies encountering non-compliance issues by removing errors and complying with the given operation.

• Improved Scalability

With the RPA’s robotic workforce, travel companies can quickly scale their operations up and down to meet the increase in travel demands speedily and cost-effectively. In addition, with automated operations created with RPA systems, companies in the travel and tourism industry can replicate these workflows and distribute them across several departments and locations. As a result, this process further reduces the manual tasks required of team members. These consequent usability and speed of scalability are crucial for travel companies to effectively respond to continued growth in travel and seasonal changes in customer demand.

• Competitor Pricing Analysis

Due to the growth of outbound and inbound travelers, the competition among travel agencies has become fiercer than ever. Some travel companies utilize RPA software to perform competitor pricing analysis to set the prices that can bring the most revenue.

Instead of asking their teams to analyze the way competitors operate, travel companies that use RPA software can track competitor data without using extensive resources. Moreover, RPA can monitor the market, determine current trends within the industry, and analyze the competitor’s performance.

• Prioritize Customer’s Needs

The integration between RPA software and AI—also known as intelligent automation—helps make a more personalized customer experience. Travel companies can apply AI to deal with tasks that need complex analysis and decision-making, including recommendation services, language processing, and online customer support.

This means that, with the help of existing information on a customer, travel companies can implement this intelligent automation to predict new travel destinations smoothly, suggest spa services for customers, and make hotel and restaurant recommendations.

Conclusion

Overall, RPA is positively impacting the travel and tourism industry due to its potential to address the critical issues involved in hospitality services, enhance productivity, and minimize operating costs without making considerable adjustments to the current processes. With minimized processing errors, improved productivity, and more accurate data, RPA increases the quality of customers’ travel experience.