Sponsored content: How to leverage ChatGPT and other automation solutions this Peaks season

During your busiest period of the year, allow technology to take some of the lift for you

With the annual challenge of Peaks, if early onset hasn’t already occurred, most look towards additional support to get the business through.

With necessary back-office processes that can be long, manual and labourious, research by travel automation specialists, Traverse Automation, found that failure to validate supplier documents against a system led to unnoticed mistakes, ultimately causing the business to discover greater financial losses than they were aware of. 

The 2023 findings showed a minimum of 0.5% to 5% of unverified documents contained errors, leading to an annual revenue loss, which in some cases, was annual losses of £4,800 and up.

Through automation, data and AI solutions, travel businesses can reduce error rates, costs and companies can then become more scalable.

Whether it be a backlog of errors from manual data entry or an influx of flight schedule changes to process one-by-one, automation can take away some of the stresses.

Business needs that are trending at the moment, solved by automation are:

• Automated document matching
• Automated flight schedule changes
• Automated ‘off-system’ bookings
• Automated booking checks

What can teams do right now to help themselves? Make sure they’re utilising these top ChatGPT tips, that are quick, easy wins:

Finance departments

1.       Getting a PDF balance sheet quickly into Excel: Highlight the lines in the PDF document and copy. Type into ChatGPT ‘Present this balance sheet in table format’ and paste in the information. You can then copy the table directly into Excel and it’ll be in the correct order. 

2.       Getting bank statement information into your accounting system: Highlight and copy transactions from the bank statement. Type into ChatGPT ‘Here are some lines from a bank statement. I need a CSV of the transactions, with a date column, details column, amount (positive for paid in, negative for paid out) and a balance’ and paste in the transactions. You are then presented with a CSV you can upload into your accounting system.

3.       Explain how to do tasks in Excel that you’re unsure how to do such as creating a pivot table: Type into ChatGPT ‘I don’t know much about Excel pivot tables, can you explain them to me?’  Then, to have practice type ‘Give me some sample data that I can plug into a pivot table.’  Copy and paste your sample data into Excel.  Ask ChatGPT ‘how do I make the pivot table in Excel.’  ChatGPT will provide you with the instructions you need.

Marketing departments

1.       Content Generation: ChatGPT can be used in many ways to help generate content for marketing, here are some examples: 

• ‘Can you design ideas for content for my travel agency website homepage?’
• ‘Can you produce a blog post around peak season in travel?’
• ‘Can you produce a social media caption for this image?’
• ‘Write a website product description for a holiday in Greece in Summer 2024’.

2.       Insights on customer data: Type into ChatGPT ‘Analyse and provide insights from client reviews and feedback to understand the overall sentiment, identify recurring themes or issues, and suggest potential areas of improvement or action steps for a travel agency business. Ensure that the analysis maintains data privacy and does not involve requesting or sharing specific customer data.’

3.       Social media marketing: Type into ChatGPT ‘Provide me with the idea to post social media content for high reach while suggesting relevant hashtags to target the age group of 30 to 50 years’

4.       Create a content calendar: Type into ChatGPT - ‘Create a content calendar for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to help a travel agency company remain in users’ feeds. 

Customer service departments

1.       Respond to your customer complaints quickly: Type into ChatGPT ‘A customer is furious because their flight has been cancelled for their holiday. Write a warm email for this customer.’

2.       Translate enquiries and responses: Type into ChatGPT ‘Translate the following paragraph into Spanish, Russian and Arabic’.

3.       Emergency response: Type into ChatGPT ‘Please give me assistance on how to handle crises and provide valuable information to travellers.’

4.       Travel planning: Type into ChatGPT ‘Please create personalised itineraries for clients based on these preferences.’

Future Peaks

If you implemented the automation tips above and your business benefitted from it, Traverse Automation’s specialists can walk you through further automation strategies - especially those that are more complicated, detailed and require more computation power to complete the process, than limited ChatGPT.

For more information about Traverse Automation and its services, visit the website here.

Or, head to the contact page to book a meeting to discuss your automation requirements.