Barceló Hotel Group has asked Altia to automate its hotel booking system in Spain. Currently, 18 tour operators in 25 hotels in Spain are involved in the project, which started in January 2022. There are plans to extend the service to other regions.
The hotel booking automation project has brought Barceló Hotel Group enhanced information quality, time optimisation and productivity, allowing it to allocate resources and people to tasks of greater value and impact on the business.
“The results we have achieved by automating the booking process with Altia have been very good. This project has been special in that it followed a bottom-up approach when normally it is the other way around; this has allowed us to have a clear view of the needs”, said Jaume Comas, EMEA Systems Director at Barceló Hotel Group. “Automation has allowed us to optimise time and processes so that our people can be engaged in tasks that add value instead of data entry,” he said.
Scaling up
Altia and Barceló Hotel Group kicked off the initiative in January 2022 with the launch of a pilot project at the Occidental Jandía Playa hotel in Fuerteventura, which has a capacity of over 400 rooms and a high volume of daily bookings. In March of the same year, the Occidental Jandía Mar hotel, also in Fuerteventura, joined the project. From then on it was extended to other hotels of the chain in Andalusia and the rest of Spain.
Booking automation has been implemented in hotels that work with the QuoHotel management software. It has allowed us to eliminate manual data entry for non-CRS-integrated booking channels, a task that took approximately three minutes per booking. With automation, data entry is done instantly, allowing real-time booking updates and minimising potential overbooking. The automated process streamlines sales, showing the real-time status of bookings at all times.
“If we look at last year’s accumulated figures at the end of the year, while we were in the process of gradual and partial implementation, we reached 40,000 confirmed bookings; this year we had already exceeded 100,000 bookings thanks to this automation”.
Jaume Comas · EMEA Systems Director at Barceló
“This project has been a challenge we have never faced before because of the way Barceló Hotel Group operates, where each hotel decides whether it will participate in the project. Other large hotel chains we have worked with centralise all integrations in back-office departments or booking centres. However, thanks to the leadership of Barceló Hotel Group’s IT Department, which coordinated the entire project, and our experienced consultants, who adapted to the circumstances, we have been able to conclude this first phase of the project satisfactorily with figures and a return on investment for the client that is exceeding initial expectations”.
Óscar Muñoz · Account Manager at Altia
The technology behind the success
Altia’s Booking Integration Platform is a SaaS software solution that works similarly to RPA (robotic process automation), allowing the automation of manual booking tasks in the PMS or CRS systems of hotel chains.
The platform also has a document management part to store all bookings processed in the Altia cloud in PDF format, regardless of whether the booking was done via email or the website. It can therefore complement or feed into other client systems by providing more information on the booking life cycle. In the cloud-based repository, all documents are immediately accessible online and can be consulted from external systems (ERP, PMS, etc.).
Altia’s booking integration platform automates the tour operator channels that register bookings via email or extranet. It is the perfect complement to a client’s Channel Manager, or other direct integrations that they have already developed, as it allows immediate integration of any channel without having to depend on third parties. The integration is done directly based on the company’s PMS or CRS in a fast and agile way.