What Corporate Travel Reconfirmation Specialists Know About Automated Hotel Reconfirmation
What Corporate Travel Reconfirmation Specialists Know About Automated Hotel Reconfirmation Your agency has just completed 200 corporate bookings for a multinational client for their quarterly review meetings. It all appears as it should, your booking system confirmations arrived, rates locked, special requests documented. Yet at 3 in the morning, your phone rings. Because despite having confirmed reservations, 20 other executives are “stuck” at the Milan Marriott due to the fact that “our reservations don’t exist” in the hotel’s system. It’s the nightmare scenario that is every corporate travel agency’s shame to admit but it does happen. Even as these agencies process thousands of bookings each month using GDS systems, the gap between a booking confirmation and a hotel can be opened as huge liability that can ruin the client relationship in one stroke. Corporate Travel Reconfirmation: The Operational Reality Behind Booking Management Corporate travel agencies function in a diverse landscape where booking confirmation is only the tip of the iceberg in a multilayered stage. Your agency gets notified via Amadeus, Sabre, or Travelport, but these reservations are processed into hotels’ completely different PMS technology stacks. This mismatch presents the essential problem that reconfirmation is intended to solve. It is an evident problem from the operational workflow. When you are booking through a GDS system you request a reservation that the hotel has to process internally. A hotel receives hundreds of bookings daily from different sources like direct bookings, OTA channels and GDS channels. In this process, important facts can fall through the cracks, rates can be altered, and reservations can go flat-out missing in hotel systems. The Hidden Costs of Manual Corporate Travel Reconfirmation Workflows Your current reconfirmation process utilizes staff members to place confirmation calls during the course of normal business. For the average agency with 1,000 bookings per month, this is about 250 staff hours, the equivalent of nearly two full-time positions exclusively spent on calling to reconfirm reservations. In high season, this amount of work can be too much for resource capacities, leading to a choice between delayed processing and adequate review. The numbers get trickier with international bookings. Coordination of time zones means that your 9 a.m. call to validate a hotel booking in Singapore happens at 10 p.m. at the site, requiring scheduling call backs and follow up when needed. These difficulties are compounded by language barriers, with important booking information potentially miscommunicated verbally over the phone. Current Manual Process Breakdown: Average confirmation call: 15 minutes for typical bookings Group bookings: 45 mins for managing multiple rooms. International properties: More time delays are involved when coordinating a time zone. Follow-up requirements: 30% of confirmations need multiple attempts Error rate: 12% -15% manual confirmations provided with inaccurate or incomplete data Why GDS Systems and Hotel Technology Create Corporate Travel Reconfirmation Gaps Agencies generally function on “integrated” technology stacks linking GDS systems to back-end processes, while hotels are operated independently with their own property management systems. That leaves an information void that regular booking confirmations can’t fill. Your confirmations with Amadeus or Sabre reflect the successful publishing of your booking but bear no relationship to how hotels process these bookings internally. Corporate bookings may have intricate needs that standard GDS confirmations may not validate. Whether your client needs connecting rooms for a board meeting, early check-in at 6 a.m. for an international flight arrival, or specific room floors for security or personal reasons, the initial booking confirmation doesn’t ensure hotels will accommodate those needs. You’ll get this information from communicating directly with the hotel staff to ensure that these corporate needs are properly recorded and will be ready for you when you arrive. Business Travel Automation: How Automated Corporate Travel Reconfirmation Improves Workflow Efficiency Automated hotel reconfirmation systems illustrate how technology has the potential to overcome the limitations of manual processes. The top platforms have processed over 1,000 bookings with no missed confirmations and provided participating agencies with a 35% reduction in operational costs. That level of performance is not just an efficiency gain its operational reliability that you absolutely don’t get with the manual processes. The method is also radically different from prior attempts on automation. Instead of replacing human interaction altogether, this type of conversational machine give rise to human-like communications that hotel employees are happy to attend to. This AI platforms automate communication and travel operations while delivering the personal engagement that hotels want with powerful AI agents for autonomous communication across multiple channels. Automated Workflow Components: Instant booking feed directly into current GDS systems Intelligent call routing through hotel time-zones and preferences Multi-language communications for international properties Complete rate, room and special request verification procedures Automatic documentation and reports for compliance and audit reasons How Corporate Travel Reconfirmation Integrates with Corporate Booking Management Systems It integrates into your existing technology stack, rather than requiring the replacement of the entire system. Advanced automation solutions come with plug-and-play microservices to connect not only to internal systems but to such services as GDS platforms, online travel agencies (OTAs), payment gateways, back-office and CRM (customer relationship management) systems, and GDSs. This solution keeps your existing booking workflows and adds automated verification. For those agencies that work on Amadeus systems, the implementation is seamless with your current booking pipeline, and you can use the integration without any upheaval in your workflow setup. Sabre customers also enjoy similar integration abilities and Travelport connections offer full GDS coverage. The system receives the new reservations from these systems in an automated manner and performs the relevant “reconfirmation actions” in accordance with configurable rules and priorities. System Integration Benefits: Existing booking workflows are not interrupted Automatic processing of all GDS booking confirmations Real-time status updates are shown on the existing dashboards Integration between booking and reconfirmation systems in the data flow Custom rules for different client needs, booking type(s) and more. Corporate Travel Reconfirmation: Addressing the Real Operational Challenges Managing Group Bookings and Complex Corporate Requirements Corporate group bookings are the most difficult part of manual reconfirmation processing. You book more
