Travel agents often book outside of the corporate booking engine. A good example of this is Ryanair or easyJet flights, and other tour operators or dmcs, who may give negotiated rates over the phone.
These manually booked elements, bear risks. Risk of typos, date errors, risk of incorrect costs. If left un-checked these bear a liability to travel agencies.
Changes can be subject to a fee, or cancelation and rebooking – if the agent made the mistake the responsibility is with the agency to correct (at their cost).
By using the data you already have, a travel agency can save substantial amount of money by using RPA tools to check this data within minutes of a booking being created. This will alert the agent if it identifies a mistake (enabling the mistake to be corrected within a cooling off period) to avoid correction costs due to human error.
The process goes as follows;
The agent books as usual and records a manually booked element into the booking.
The RPA bot sees the new manual booking/element.
The RPA bot identifies the supplier and starts a validation process.
The RPA bot logs into the supplier system and checks the information against what was booked and what has been loaded in the booking record.
If the data is inconsistent, action is taken, this could be alerting, and/or correcting the data to avoid cancelation/rebooking costs.
Summary
Travel agencies can drive efficiencies via RPA, providing quality audit checks and identifying human mistakes before it has to pickup the bill to correct them.