Choice Hotels nets satisfied clients with intelligent process automation

For hotels, loading negotiated rates in a timely manner is key to successful corporate travel sales. Rate loading ensures that negotiated rates are available for corporate customers to book in the hotel’s reservation systems and third-party channels. Choice Hotels worked with ZS to use robotics and intelligent process automation (IPA) to automate its rate loading process almost entirely, resulting in significantly shorter lead times, cost savings, improved customer satisfaction and higher revenue.

The challenge

Achieving speed and accuracy in rate loading has always been a challenge for the hotel industry. Most hotel brands have a complex, manual rate loading process involving multiple touch points, teams and systems, which can lead to costly delays and errors. It often takes up to 30 days for brands to load rates, meaning that corporate customers can’t book a brand’s hotels during that time. And once rates are loaded, corporate customers and their travel management companies must conduct expensive rate audits to make sure that the loaded rates are accurate.

Choice Hotels, like many other hotel companies, wanted to improve its rate loading speed. “We wanted to upgrade our ability to load rates in a reasonable amount of time, with greater accuracy,” said Chad Fletcher, VP of global sales. “With feedback we received from customers, we saw firsthand the opportunity to quicken the rate loading process to help facilitate deals.”

Abhijit Patel, VP of marketing and distribution strategy at Choice Hotels, agreed. “We listened to hotels and corporate clients and determined that, through automation, we could improve accuracy and speed and seize additional revenue opportunities.”

Choice Hotels had already reinforced its commitment to corporate customers through marked investments in its brands, properties and technology. The hotel business saw improving rate loading as an opportunity to double down on this commitment to corporate customers and use quick, seamless and accurate rate loading as a competitive differentiator.

The solution

Working with ZS, Choice Hotels implemented IPA, which allows computer software, or a robot, to mimic the work that humans had previously done. Rate loading was a very good candidate for automation through IPA because it involves legacy systems, structured data and repetitive but rules-based tasks.

By automating significant portions of the rate loading process, IPA decreased manual effort so rates could be loaded faster and with no errors. “Because everything with rate loading is a process, and you’re repeating the process hundreds of thousands of times a year, IPA was definitely the right thing to do,” Patel said. “It allows you to monitor performance in real time to show what’s working and what’s not using a combination of automation and strong analytics.”

Choice Hotels’ history of working with ZS made the firm the ideal collaborator for this effort, Fletcher added.

“With any project, they bring inherent knowledge about our people and our process that’s unparalleled,” he said. “That’s the value they bring at the very beginning, and the output is why we keep coming back.”

The impact

Through implementing IPA, a solution built with Amazon Aurora, Amazon Simple Storage Solution, Amazon Lambda and Amazon CloudWatch, Choice’s average rate loading time decreased from 14 days to two days. Because rates are available for booking much earlier than before, Choice expects to realize a significant increase in revenue in shifting its manual staffing effort for rate loading to higher-value activities.

IPA has both increased customer satisfaction and helped the company get an edge over its competitors, Fletcher said. “Corporate travel managers are telling us that speed and accuracy for rate loading have improved, and there’s more clarity around the process. We follow up with them when it’s completed in a more consistent way, and they’re not getting that with the competition.”

Choice Hotels is also finding other opportunities to deploy IPA, including responding to RFPs on behalf of franchisees. “We’re combining IPA with AI for better pricing and looking at using it in other areas of the company to shift away from manual processes to help improve efficiency by 10 to 20%,” Patel said.

Overall, IPA helped Choice Hotels reinforce its value proposition to corporate travel managers: To make their lives easier.

“Nothing shows our commitment to our customers more than solving one of their biggest pain points,” Patel said. “We went from a year where we often received comments on the rate loading process to, the very next year, zero complaints. It doesn’t get any better than that.”