How Automation in the Booking Process Can Help Hotel Labor Shortages

Labor shortages are a major issue in the hospitality industry. For hotels specifically, 87% have reported being understaffed and are finding it difficult to meet the demands that come with high travel seasons. Some are even having to turn away business due to their lack of employee availability. The rise in overwhelmed staff doesn't just risk an increase in guest dissatisfaction. It's also easier for staff to make costly mistakes.

Inefficient Use of Time

Staff may be wasting more precious time more than they realize. Consider one scenario Sertifi's familiar with: how much manual effort might still be going into finalizing event contracts and payments.​

• How much time are you spending printing, scanning, or faxing paper (not to mention how much time are you asking your guests to spend with paper)? ​
• Are you emailing files and requests to guests and having to follow up yourself? ​
• Are you manually re-entering information into your Sales & Catering system? ​
• Are you key-entering payment information into pin pads when a guest isn’t present? ​

Now times all that time by the number of events you manage on average. On the flipside, how could you grow your business if these steps were easier?
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Increased Risk of Fraud & Chargebacks

With the increase of payment fraud globally, guest-facing staff need to be ever-vigilant to make sure they are verifying cards and capturing payment details securely. Your staff is your first line of defense in fraud prevention, so fewer staff members – and worse, incomplete or ineffective training – presents a security gap that fraudsters love to fill. This means hoteliers are spending more precious time and money on chargebacks than they can afford.

Luckily, there's a solution that can bring ease to the situation: automation. For little effort and cost, letting technology take care of office-related tasks is easy and gives staff more time to dedicate to post-arrival tasks that are harder to offload.

Filling the Gaps with Technology

According to Sertifi’s latest hospitality industry report, 71% of hotels do not use the same solution to collect signatures, payments, and authorizations. By using fewer systems to manage more tasks, hoteliers can save time by managing fewer manual tasks and security problems inefficient, outdated processes lead to.

Doing More with Less

Labor makes up about 50% of a hotel’s operations costs. Automation can cover many operational needs without a staff member present, allowing hoteliers to better use the team they have while delivering a great experience. By using automation tools, not only do you receive an extra set of hands, but you also gain the ability to meet guests on their level and provide them with a way to send agreements and payments easily and digitally.

Protecting You & Your Guests

By automating agreement and payment workflows, guest information is secured and analyzed for any indicating factors of a fraudulent card. In the aforementioned hospitality report, 32% of hoteliers reported requiring guests to provide payment information though insecure methods such as fax, text, email, mail, or over the phone.

As discussed in this recent post, digitalization and automation lets you take advantage of the best security and fraud prevention measures and makes it easy to stay compliant. By authenticating payment cards and securing guest information, hotels are less likely to be subject to fraud, chargebacks, and hidden fees.

Delivering the Best Experience

Automated workflows are key when it comes to successfully operating a hotel. By using an automated platform, many parts can be played at once, allowing hoteliers to take a breath and work smarter to increase revenue and guest satisfaction.