As Group Travel Ticks Up, Automated Group Billing Offers Advantages for Hotels
This spring, the world witnessed an uptick in travel. While Delta-variant-driven fears may have temporarily quelled some travel growth late Summer 2021, there’s a slated increase in holiday travel bookings.
In fact, booking holiday travel months in advance may not be enough.
In particular, planned group travel continues to rise for the holidays. So, while group travel trends in September may have slowed, not the same case for the holidays.
Similarly telling are visibly increased booking trends within luxury travel. This is also telling of disposable income trends.
For some luxury hotel properties, booking windows currently stand at six to nine months.
That’s nearly double 2019’s travel window, even compared to the year’s record booking periods.
According to STR, the $1.5 trillion dollar travel and hospitality industry remains optimistic – particularly on group travel. And optimism is evident both domestically and internationally.
Consumers are booking holiday vacation travel earlier than before. Some hotels are already fully booked.
From a search engine perspective, Travel + Leisure reported Kayak’s optimism. The magazine quoted the online travel booking site’s Vice President of Marketing.
This marketing leader reported that Kayak is witnessing “significant momentum around international and domestic flight searches when compared to 2020, up 155% and 212%, respectively.”
This significant uptick proves COVID-19 is not holding holiday travelers back. Additionally, increased remote work makes more leisure travel possible.
With the holidays on the horizon, hotels should start for this planning now. Particularly because slated increased group travel means hotel revenue benefits from such foresight.
Group Billing by Evention makes it easy to navigate the billing cycle for groups.
And more demand, means more room revenue for hotels.
The automated solution condenses all areas of group contract – contract obligations, forecast-based planning, and accounting of actualized services. This redefines the chaos often associated with billing a group, including cancellations.
Given the ebbs and flows related to this pandemic-stricken period, automation that accounts for the accounting related to rebookings or cancellations may be particularly helpful.
By leveraging automation, Group Billing by Evention 1) reconciles scheduled payments with received payments, 2) regulates customer credit with consolidated evaluation and trackable allocations to programs, 3) pre-populates contracted concessions to rely on the most accurate consumption calculations for agency commissions, consumption attrition, etc. Eliminating the traditional manual and error-fraught nature of billing a hotel group creates a smooth billing process.
Ultimately, it also saves time and cost by centralizing group contract components from initial sale through final invoice.
Additionally, by alleviating strain on group contract management, the solution allows hotel accounting teams to extend their efforts to other general management areas – even valuable customer-facing management scenarios.
As hotel accounting teams navigate an uptick in travel, automated group billing offers the benefits these teams need to capitalize on this trend that’s driving increased revenue.
