Dr. Ameet Patil, Founder & CEO of Ecobillz Private Limited

AI is an essential element that is influencing the way the hospitality sector operates, aiding in streamlining key business procedures and assisting in strategic decision-making, with minimum turnaround time for the business owners. Ecobillz has integrated AI into its technology solution to smartly assess the challenges and offer solutions.

How AI is changing the trends and day-to-day working of the hotel industry

As every operator shifts onto a technology platform, there is a huge data being generated at the backend. More the digital data, more the problem is in making it accessible in a cleaned, usable format. The huge chunk of data will not make sense if we try to sort and use it manually. This manual process will the turnaround time by the hotel will be very high.

A case in point is the product called Ecobillz Reconciliation, that uses AI right from bots to capture data, to clean data, to churn data and to reconcile transactions that arrive from various sources at the backend. Today, the hotels receive payments from multiple sources including traditional methods like cash, debit cards, credit cards and electronic bank transfers. The number of payment gateways has just multiplied with the introduction of mobile payments. A few of those include Apple Pay, G-pay, Samsung Pay, Paytm, Amazon Pay, etc. Along with this there are numerous Online Travel Agents (OTA) such as Goibibo, MakeMyTrip, OYO, Booking.com etc. that collect from customers and make payments to hotels. It is a humongous task if done manually to reconcile all these transactions and settle them in the back office. While this is just an example of payments received at a single hotel, the scenario gets grimmer if we look at all the payments to be reconciled at a central level of the entire hotel chain — from travel package booking through various websites to e-loyalty programs to customer payment via various methods.

Ecobillz Reconciliation uses the AI-driven bots to get onto every related portal, search for the right data on behalf of the customer, export/download the relevant reports, and build a data lake for the hotels. Thus, even if the hotel gets aggregated payments from payment providers at the end of the month, they do not have to struggle to reconcile the payments against each of their guests. Not only does the tool automatically perform a dynamic and complete reconciliation, it is able to detect and highlight any discrepancies if any and helps back office team to get those resolved.

As of date, a number of hotel and retail giants are using Ecobillz Reconciliation. Over 50+ hotels and 1,500+ retail outlets have already benefitted from this module saving them both time and money while making their processes more efficient.

How has AI impacted your brand?

Ecobillz Reconciliation is a transparent service. Using this solution, the hotel brands have been benefitted in an unprecedented manner. Their services to end customers have improved by leaps and bounds reduces a lot of turnaround time in responses. They are fast with minimal errors. Any mistake in swiping a card and discrepancies are highlighted and effectively resolved within a given timeframe. Using AI over API, the Smart PMS maps every detail and shows a clean dashboard to the accounts/finance team while beeping off those entries which are overdue. The engine also shows the payments that are pending from hotel to the vendors or settling the loyalty program dues. An efficient back office revitalizes and revolutionizes the hospitality sector and takes it to the next level.

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