The hotel reservation automation project has allowed Barceló Hotel Group to improve information quality, optimize time, and increase productivity by allocating resources and people to tasks with greater value and business impact.
“The results we've achieved with the automation of the reservation process with ALTIA have been very positive. It's a unique project, having been created from the bottom up, whereas the normal approach is the other way around; and this has allowed us to gain visibility into needs,” said Jaume Comas , EMEA Systems Director at Barceló Hotel Group. “With automation, we've been able to optimize time and processes so we can focus on tasks that add value, not just data entry,” he emphasized.
A project on scale
ALTIA and Barceló Hotel Group launched 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 daily booking volume. In March of the same year, the Occidental Jandía Mar hotel, also in Fuerteventura, joined the project, and from there, the project was expanded to other hotels in the hotel chain in Andalusia and the rest of Spain.
Booking automation is implemented in hotels that use QuoHotel's hotel management software. It has eliminated the need to manually enter reservation data that doesn't go through channels integrated with the CRS, which took approximately three minutes per reservation. With automation, data entry is done instantly, allowing reservations to be updated in real time and minimizing potential overbooking . The automated process streamlines sales and provides real-time information on the status of reservations at all times.
"If we look at the total number of reservations from last year at the end of the year, while we were in the gradual and partial implementation process, we reached 40,000 confirmed reservations; this year, at the end of October, we had recovered more than 100,000 reservations thanks to this automation."
Jaume Comas · Director of Information Systems EMEA Barceló
“The project presented us with a challenge that was previously unheard of , given that the Barceló Hotel Group's unique nature means that each hotel is responsible for deciding whether to participate in the project, unlike other large hotel chains we've worked with, which centralize all integrations in back-office departments or reservation centers. However, the leadership of Barceló Hotel Group's IT Department, coordinating the entire project, as well as the experience of our consultants in adapting to this situation, has allowed us to successfully complete this first phase of the project with numbers and a return on investment for the client that are exceeding initial expectations.”
Oscar Muñoz · Account Manager at ALTIA
The technology behind success
ALTIA's Reservation Integration Platform is a SaaS software that, acting similarly to RPA (Robotic Process Automation), automates manual reservation entry tasks in hotel chains' PMS or CRS .
The platform also includes a document management component, storing all processed reservations in the Altia cloud in PDF format, regardless of whether the reservation communication originates from email or the web. Therefore, it can be used to complement or supplement other client systems, providing greater insight into the reservation lifecycle . By acting as a cloud-based document repository, all documents will be immediately accessible online and can be accessed from external systems (ERP, PMS, etc.).
A project with ALTIA's booking integration platform that involves automating tour operator channels that communicate reservations via email or extranet would be completely complementary to a Channel Manager contracted by the client , or to other direct integrations already developed, as it allows for immediate integration of any channel without the need to rely on third parties. The integration would be done directly with the corporate PMS or CRS in an agile and rapid manner.
