Travel Still Feels the Effect of COVID-19
The outlook for travel remains positive as the market is poised to finish off 2024 at or above pre-pandemic levels which is good news for travel businesses and providers. The bad news is that staffing along the frontlines still remains a critical challenge in the industry. An American Hotel and Lodging Association survey from January of this year indicated that 67% of owners and operators were still experiencing staffing shortages and 12% of those respondents indicating their property was ‘severely understaffed’. From the survey, an average of 9 positions needed to be filled, up from 7 in 2023. On a global scale, the World Tourism Organization’s research estimates tourism vacancies to be in the millions and suggested that an aging workforce and lack of adequate training programs as the cause for these shortages. For travel businesses, vacancies in teams that provide guest experiences and housekeeping duties creates a critical problem and could lead to gaps in service and quality. The travel industry is driven by reputation and gaps in service and quality will negatively affect the business’s bottom line. In this highly competitive marketplace, travel brands cannot afford to lose guests or the negative marketing associated with sub par experiences.
Hiring for the travel industry still remains a challenge as the quality and quantity of enthusiastic candidates continues to shrink. The other challenge in hiring is getting new employees fully trained and ready to work in the shortest and most cost effective way possible. Can recent innovations in technology provide new methods of training that are more effective and faster than traditional methods? Will travel brands benefit from more impactful training that gets new hires contributing from DAY ONE? A new project from TraveTechnologySolutions.net aims to bridge training with work experience to eliminate service gaps and ensure consistent levels of quality.
A New Way to Train New Hires
Introducing hospit-Ai-lity, a brand new, #indev training platform that utilizes the engagement capabilities of Artificial Intelligence to deliver fast and effective training to new hires. Designed for travel new hires and travel businesses, hospit-Ai-lity provides key functionality to help eliminate service and quality gaps in guest facing and custodial teams:
- Teaches new hires fundamental and essential customer interaction skills
- Trains new hires in brand and job specific tasks and processes
- Delivers real time individual support during the critical onboarding stage
- Plain language prompts and responses encourages new hire engagement
- Builds individual confidence with dynamic learning paces and two way interactions
- Increases worker satisfaction with ongoing upskilling and development opportunities
hospit-Ai-lity is a powerful tool that improves greatly on traditional ways to train new employees. Adopting the latest AI innovations, hospit-Ai-lity offers vast processing ability and high levels of engagement and interactivity, positioning it as the ultimate training platform for fast paced work environments, such as hotels, resorts and other consumer facing travel businesses.
Tools that Positively Impact Travel Businesses
hospit-Ai-lity (HAIY) is designed as an effective and practical training platform that ultimately delivers significant features and benefits for the travel industry. HAIY’s mission is to help guest facing travel businesses maintain high levels of service and quality which are crucial to successful operations. Travel operators and providers can realize the following benefits and features when utilizing HAIY:
- HAIY gets new hires ready to work, more effectively and much faster then traditional training methods, reducing and eliminating potential service and quality gaps
- HAIY reduces expensive new hire turnover, a major problem in the travel industry, by elevating the crucial onboarding and transition phase
- HAIY is much more cost effective than traditional training methods by delivering content digitally
- HAIY drives individual accuracy and productivity through ongoing development, upskilling and performance evaluation
Travel businesses depend on frontline teams to deliver top notch guest experiences as well as maintain operational aspects of the property. Hiring challenges can lead to gaps in service and quality that will negatively affect all aspects of the business. HAIY is a practical way to train new hires and maintain skill sets and capabilities of the most important part of the business, the frontline team.
Next Level Training, Next Level Benefits
In spite of traffic and volume levels returning to pre-pandemic levels, the travel industry is still reeling from the effects of COVID-19 shutdowns in other important areas such as hiring. Travel brands cannot afford to have any gaps in guest services or experience quality in this highly competitive marketplace. A difficult hiring environment combined with lengthy training times will negatively impact the business but can technology be used to create a more effective and faster method of training? Travel businesses can benefit from highly engaging and interactive training tools that can get new hires working from day one. hospit-Ai-lity uses machine learning and natural language processing to deliver:
- Essential customer engagement skills
- Job specific skills and processes
- Organizational habits
- Ongoing individual support and evaluation
The use of private data sets allows for easy updates and changes to hospit-Ai-lity as training needs evolve. A managerial dashboard provides completion and evaluation reports on new hires as well as interval recommendations on individual development. hospit-Ai-lity is next level training that delivers next level benefits to travel businesses and the industry.
For more information, please visit the hospit-Ai-lity website.