Automated Corporate Contract Loading for a Leading Group of Hotels

Process Overview

The “Corporate Contract Loading’’ process involved setting up of negotiated rates in various GDS basis contracts signed between hotel properties and their corporate customers. This process has 5 sub-processes that involve configuration of rates in different applications for both legacy and new properties of the hotel chain. As the final step of the process, these negotiated rates are distributed on 4 major GDS (Amadeus, Sabre, Worldspan, Apollo/Galileo) in the defined Hotel chains.

Automation Need

The process was highly complex and the hotel group realized the need for automation because of below reasons:

• High manual effort and cost of operations
• Timely availability of rates to prevent revenue leakages
• Low tolerance for human error

Benefits

• 4X Faster Delivery – Bots executed a transaction four times faster than a human. Manual execution would have taken 24 weeks while the Bots executed the entire load in 6 weeks.
• Lower Cost of Delivery – The automation saved $400K in operational expenses thus creating a significant impact.
• Improved Quality & Accuracy – The Bots uploaded the data with 99.9% accuracy.

About the Client

The client is a leading French multinational hospitality company that owns, manages and franchises hotels, resorts, and vacation properties. It operates in more than 100 countries with 4,800+ hotels and around 280,000 employees.

Solution

• IGT Automation Center of Excellence (CoE) studied the process execution steps and drafted the Contract Loading RPA PDD (Process Design Document).
• RPA was developed and deployed to production with zero slippages. A set of 18 Bots were run for a period of six weeks to successfully migrate 500,000 hotel rates and set up 1,400 B2B Corporate Contracts inventory into the client’s reservation system in Phase 1.
• The Bots accepted the ‘Contract file’ from the global sales team as input and transformed it into excel input necessary for executing the sequential sub-processes- Rate Loading, Rate Transfer, Contract Loading, GDS Distribution, and PCC Setup.
• Phase 1 aimed to automate time critical back-office processes – Rate Loading and Contract Loading. It was later made active for all contract types thus enabling 70% automation coverage.

Applications in Scope

• Hotel’s Internal Reservation System
• GDS via Lanyon - Sabre, Amadeus, Apollo/Galileo & Worldspan

Automation Tool Partner

• Automation Anywhere