Automation has been helping various industries speed up manual repetitive tasks since even before the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century literally picked up steam. Now, with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA), businesses are finding new ways to enhance efficiency by automating even difficult and less repetitive tasks.

Everybody wants to implement AI, but before rushing into innovation, it is important to ask some basic questions. For example, what are the optimal use cases? Where is the maximum return on investment?

Examining a few real-world problems from the hospitality industry provides insight into how automation can best be applied to overcome current challenges.

Power Bill Consumption

In the hotel industry, every facility utilizes power for daily usages, as well as for providing services to customers who may come with electric vehicles (EVs) or recreational vehicles (RVs).

Accounting and administration requires that building owners, including hotels and large hospitality companies, record power consumption accurately for each hotel, but this poses many challenges for a variety of reasons, including:

  1. Each state has multiple utility providers with unique bill formats/structures, making it difficult to process data at a central location or with traditional Optical Character Readers (OCRs).
  2. Manual data entry for power bills can be inconsistent, and contain human errors. Furthermore, human delays between actual power consumption and data entry will make the data less reliable for decision-making purposes.
  3. Entering data manually is a slow process that takes time and attention from hotel employees, which can take away resources from other important tasks.

This is a critical area in which AI and OCR offer solutions that can help hotel owners convert these challenges into cost-saving opportunities.

Using automated tools, hotels can scan power bills and send the scanned bills to a predefined email address. At the receiving end, the AI bot reads the emails and retrieves scanned bills, understands the information on the utility bills, and has the ability to extract crucial information such as:

  • Type of utility bill
  • Purpose of power consumption (i.e. Heating, Cooling, Electricity, Catering, Laundry Services, Recreational Facilities, EV Charging, Water)
  • Billing period dates
  • Amount due ($)
  • Unit consumed
  • Late fees

Hotel owners and hospitality brands are finding that automating the power bill process offers significant benefits. For hotel owners, a centralized database of power consumption allows for data-driven decision-making, optimizing operations for cost savings. Monitoring monthly energy usage enables owners to identify potential areas where they can reduce consumption, and thereby lower utility costs. Regular monitoring can also help predict when equipment needs maintenance, preventing sudden breakdowns and downtime, and reducing the expense risk of unexpected repairs. On the front line, good energy management, which includes keeping machines and appliances operating optimally, can have a major impact on improving the guest experience (just ask a hotel guest in a hot climate when the air conditioner isn’t working).

A centralized database also benefits hospitality brands by allowing organizations to better analyze and manage energy use across their portfolio of brand properties, leading to more efficient operations, and compare their hotels with others in the same category to establish best practices in energy management. AI models can optimize energy usage by determining the most efficient times to run certain operations, reducing peak demand charges. Using AI models on large data can quickly identify unusual patterns in energy consumption that may indicate problems, or indicate opportunities for savings. Additionally, AI models can analyze historical power bill data to predict future energy needs, providing metrics for better planning and resource allocation.

Tracking energy consumption is an important factor for setting and achieving sustainability goals, which given global concerns about climate change, can improve hospitality brand value. Demonstrating a commitment to energy efficiency can enhance a hospitality brand’s image and make it more attractive to environmentally-conscious travelers, as well as investors who are increasingly interested in sustainable business practices. Efficient energy management can improve stakeholder confidence.

Ensuring Rate Parity Across Online Platforms

Another example of automation in action is in the area of rate parity, which refers to consistent pricing for the rate of a hotel room across all internal and external websites. Hotel operators want customers to be confident that no matter where they make a room reservation, they will receive the same rate, whether booking on the hotel’s own website, a travel aggregator, or a discount travel site. Providing fair rates and transparency is critical to making the customer experience easier and clearer when they’re choosing where to stay.

While ensuring rate parity across multiple Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) is important for hospitality companies, there are many challenges in maintaining rate parity across different platforms, largely due to the fact that hotel prices are constantly changing, influenced by supply and demand. Various factors, such as the time of year, vacancy rates, and large scale events keep hotel rates in flux, but maintaining rates on multiple OTAs at the same time is tricky. Because each website has its own system and rules for changing prices and room availability, strong technology and good planning is required to ensure that all these different websites receive the most current rate information without interruption. This is further complicated when OTAs lower their own fees to offer cheaper prices. In this case, the OTAs may capture most of the bookings, and hotels will make less money.

RPA now offers an effective solution to this problem, by using this automation tool to monitor rate parity across various OTAs for a hotel, and log data in a central repository. With RPA innovation, it is possible to:

  • Develop an RPA bot using a technology platform
  • Configure the bot to log into each designated OTA website
  • Search for hotel rooms based on room type and dates
  • Extract the displayed room rates and store them in centralized databases for reporting and data analysis
  • Compare extracted rates with the hotel's Central Reservation System (CRS) rates
  • Set up automated alerts for any discrepancies identified.

The RPA process offers hoteliers key benefits and advantages that can improve the balance sheet while promoting brand loyalty. Perhaps most important is how rate parity drives direct bookings to maximize hotel revenue. Simply put, rate parity helps hotels make more money and avoid losing it. When all websites show the same price, people are less likely to keep searching for a better deal. This means more people will book directly with the hotel, which saves the hotel money on fees paid to other websites.

Automating rate parity also helps hotels maintain impartiality and reliability, by making it possible for them to charge the same price for rooms across digital platforms. Finding different rates for the exact same hotel rooms on different websites creates frustrating experiences for customers, which can hurt a hotel or hospitality brand’s image and reputation. Conversely, keeping rates equal across the booking landscape levels the playing field and makes it easier for customers to find the best deal among various hotels and brands.

Advanced automation tools are streamlining tasks and creating process improvement in ways that can have a meaningful impact on hotel companies’ financial statement and customer experiences.

Creating better owner/user experiences

In addition to better managing utility bills and rate parity, the hospitality industry is implementing AI use cases in other ways that drive process improvement in the back office and on the front line. On the administrative side, for example, AI can automate property insurance policy validation and automatically send delinquency letters, saving human staff time and reducing human error. In the customer-facing area, AI chatbots are making it easier for hotel guests and prospective customers to get the answers they need quickly online, without waiting on phone hold for a human service representative. This also helps owners manage personnel more efficiently.

Through these examples, as well as other use cases, AI automation will continue to transform the hospitality industry, offering many key benefits that provide hotel businesses with meaningful ROI. By streamlining processes and operations, personalizing guest experiences, and optimizing revenue management, AI automation improves operational efficiency and elevates the guest experience to a new level. The predictive nature of AI can help hotels analyze market trends and update plans and strategies accordingly.

Ultimately, AI automation in hotels is not about robots taking all the jobs. It is about using AI to make people's jobs easier and better, giving the hotel industry the tools to be more creative and find new ways to improve the hospitality experience.