The tourism industry has a huge contribution to the global economy with a market share in the trillions of dollars. Despite this sector facing serious cuts during the last pandemic, traveling is picking back up and getting back to normal. Yet, to fully reboot the industry, tourist operators and agencies arranging personal and business journeys must review the way they process travel requests and manage their regular workflows. Why is it so essential to automate processes in tourism?

The tourism and hospitality sector covers many various elements such as visa application procedures, accommodation and transportation booking, business trip arrangements with further reimbursement of travel expenses, the entertainment segment, car rental, etc. Each of these procedures comprises numerous repetitive steps requiring accuracy and high-level performance. Handling them manually in the old way often causes errors in documentation and travel approval delays. Implementing cutting-edge workflow automation technology can help tour companies to solve a bunch of operational issues.

The bottlenecks to resolve with travel automation management

Let’s take a look at the typical travel inquiry process. A tour company receives an email with a travel request form for a journey. Before checking tickets and hotel availability, an employee should contact the customer to confirm their inquiry is accepted and being processed. After checking availability with the service providers, the agent compares and calculates prices considering all possible discounts and the company’s margin. The customer and agent may discuss trip details and negotiate on conditions several times, so the agent needs to repeat certain actions, and the time required for making a final tour offer increases. When the customer is satisfied with the offer, they need to confirm their booking by signing the travel approval form. Finally, it comes to invoice generation and processing, confirming the booking with the service providers, etc. Also, tour agents often help customers to collect all the required documents and prepare their visa application in a proper way.

As demonstrated, travel request workflows are complex and include many routine steps. And with the business trip arrangements, the process can be even more complicated, as the customer also needs to get the business travel request form approval from their company and later apply for reimbursement of travel expenses. Considering all of the above, it’s easy to identify the main operational problems specific to the tourism industry:

1. Multiple forms and document-heavy workflows. Tourism-related business workflows require both agents and customers to fill out numerous forms, starting from a travel request form template and its validation to a final client feedback form.
2. Time and labor-consuming processes. Each of the trip organization processes requires a lot of time to properly complete steps. Employees get exhausted when performing routine tasks.
3. Human errors. Manually generating and managing all documentation causes errors in client data and trip details. This costs companies money.
4. Lost emails and travel requests. Not only can an email accidentally go to spam, but an employee can also miss it in the bunch of inquiries received, especially during the high season. Customers expect agents to answer their requests as soon as possible, not more than a couple of hours. Otherwise, they simply write to competitors and choose those who act more promptly. Thus, any lost inquiry results in lost profit.
5. Delays in communication with customers and service providers. It’s highly important to communicate with clients on each step of the trip arrangement workflow. Without travel approval software and travel automation management tools, communication gets slow and inefficient.