Hospitality Tech Solutions: The Power of Automation

The hospitality and travel industry runs on one primary goal: customer satisfaction. Guests want to feel well taken care of before, during, and even after their stay, and in exchange for positive experiences, you’ll of course earn happy, loyal customers.

Creating excellent experiences certainly requires commitment and consistency from your staff, but in a digital-first world, it’s easier than ever to exceed expectations without overtaxing employees. In fact, it might be a requirement if you’re still facing staff shortages. Nowadays, customer satisfaction is often interchangeable with customer convenience, and convenience often means simple and immediate. The truth is technology is better at being those things than humans.

Automated processes, made possible with powerful technology, make it easier to create the convenience your guests demand and staff survive on.

When you work smarter with technology, everyone benefits from a better experience.

Automation & Adaptability

It’s easy to stick with what’s familiar. Completing tasks in the way you always have lets you work confidently and therefore efficiently. Moreover, it’s reasonable to want to limit staff retraining and avoid slowing down productivity to learn new processes. That said, staying in a routine can make it difficult to keep up with external factors triggering inevitable change.

It’s important to adapt to changing expectations early and even lead transformation. For example, you might be used to printing documents and scanning them to email or fax out, but on the receiving end, your digital-minded guests are wondering why your process requires so much manual effort. For them, it’s far easier to send you information online (and convenience aside, that way is also far more secure).

Then there’s your staff. Consider all the small tasks your front desk or events teams could easily automate with technology – small tasks that add up. Lean on technology where you can so you can create more time for tasks that are harder to hand off. Better yet, create more time to invent new ways to deliver a great guest experience.

Ultimately, technology makes it easier to adapt to change, whether change is predictable like a busy season or the opening of a new property, or unpredictable like the sudden departure of a staff member or changing consumer behavior. Plus, the best technology is easy to use and lets your staff see value quickly, limiting the hassle of retraining and strain of stalled productivity.

Automation & Integrated Experiences

With an increase in technology use, it’s easy to build an unwieldly tech stack. Adopting a number of best-in-breed solutions is smart – you want your tech solutions to be excellent at specific things, not average at everything – but if your systems don’t work together, you’re creating inefficiencies in the handoffs between them. Responsible technology providers value business partnerships and regularly invest in building integrations to reduce this burden for you. Many even offer open APIs to allow your team to build custom integrations to meet the unique needs of your team. Automating the transfer of information across systems, and keeping it secure and accurate along the way, is critical to maintaining staff efficiency and positive brand perception amongst your guests.

Automation & The Network Effect

Technology isn’t the only thing that coexists. Hotels are one of many players in the value chain and a customer’s experience. Take corporate travel, for example: you have the traveler, the person coordinating the trip, the company paying for the trip, and the hotel hosting the trip. Technology helps everyone “talk” to each other in an automated way, giving the complete network of players an easy, secure experience. Imagine a world where a travel manager completes a booking, you instantly receive the trip and payment details in your PMS, and the business traveler arrives with everything already taken care of for them. That sounds more like a holiday, doesn’t it?

At Sertifi, we believe automation is key to our industry’s success, so much so, we recently unveiled a new mission statement: agree faster, work smarter, build better experiences.

We aim to give our community all the tools needed to make the agreements process more efficient and scalable, and more importantly, make it easy to take advantage of those tools. This means a powerful, user friendly, integrated platform that connects the hospitality and travel network together. Our entire company recently spent time strategizing together how we’ll deliver on our mission in 2023 and years to come — and we’re excited to bring our community along for the journey.