RateGain sees opportunity in hospitality’s talent crunch

livemint.com:

NEW DELHI : An estimated 50 million workers who left the global hospitality industry in the last three years amid the devastating impact of the pandemic may never return to work. This has caused a major challenge for hotels, travel agencies, and other travel service providers, who are struggling to find enough staff to meet a post-covid surge in demand. However, one company sees this as an opportunity to assist these businesses in generating more revenues.

NSE-listed RateGain Travel Technologies Ltd expects that technology and artificial intelligence (AI) will play a key role in shaping the future of travel planning as the industry tackles the labour shortage. Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, hotels and airlines worldwide have shown remarkable recovery and have even surpassed their pre-covid performance. However, the industry now faces a new reality where traditional approaches to attracting talent may no longer be effective.

“Trip planning, at present, is a very broken experience. Even with consumer technology driving hyper-personalization and the likes of Google and Facebook entering travel, the entire trip experience continues to be that way because the entire technology system continues to be fragmented, and till the time hotels start approaching it as an ‘experience problem’, instead of treating it as a ‘technology problem’, we will be stuck with the same bad experiences," said Bhanu Chopra, managing director at RateGain. The company amalgamates user data from its hotels, car rentals, and airline and OTA clients around the world.