Corporate lodging and payment technology company HRS has launched a new tool to tackle travel for project managers, the company announced Monday.
Targeted toward companies that send crews on location for long periods of time—such as those in the construction, energy, media and mining industries—HRS' new Workforce Travel platform uses AI and automation for procurement, booking, digitized invoice reconciliation and payments for such travel, according to the company.
The tool offers travel managers the ability to receive detailed reporting from project managers, or whoever is in charge of crew travel.
"When you get into workforce, these are crews that are away for extended periods of time, and it's not an easy booking," said Vincent Campana, chief revenue officer for HRS' business ventures unit. "They are at times in secondary and tertiary markets. You're moving multiple crews at different times. And there are contractors. They're all coming in at different times, and then you have the complexity of when someone doesn't arrive on time because of a delay, or you have to swap them out."
The tool automates much of what traditionally has been a manual process for users.
Travel managers in many cases have little visibility into or jurisdiction over crew travel management or spending, Campana said, but the platform will offer more detail into spending due to folio automation.
The platform takes a corporate's own or HRS' negotiated rates and provides the best options for each group within a project, recommending the top five hotels. Managers can alter preferred options based on project requirements, including offering specific recommendations based on the position of the traveler. (Think Julia Roberts versus a gaffer for a film production.)
The hotels will see the booking with the corporation's name "brought to you by HRS" or "from HRS on behalf of" a corporation, according to Campana.
Automation enables the booking, management and payments for each team, according to HRS. Further, the technology monitors bookings across projects to prevent double bookings of teams and/or individuals. The tool also can tell the status of a booking. "Say you're missing the crew list or the actors or production people, you didn't load it in, or you didn't set up a group yet for your booking, but you put a placeholder somewhere, and our machine learning says there's more to do on this booking," Campana said.
A user also can replicate projects if needed, for example when a crew heads to a city for a film shoot and needs to return a few months later. The user can create that crew list from an archive, and if there are any changes, they can swap out the crew in full or individual names, Campana said.
HRS began piloting the program in the fourth quarter of 2023 with a large rail provider and has since expanded it to different verticals, according to the company.