ProVantage Saves 40 Hours per Week by Booking Hotels With Engine

Background

As a retail service organization that performs remodels, new store setups and department resets, ProVantage Corporate Solutions simplifies operations for nationwide retailers by bringing in specialized talent to manage complex jobs.

However, when it came to their own operations — the significant undertaking of staffing projects around the country and managing their workforce lodging — they were sorely in need of simple, efficient solutions to ease the demand on their team’s time.

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The Challenge

ProVantage’s projects require teams ranging from five to 45 people and lasting from a few days to 16 weeks. Especially for the longer-term stays, booking was a major headache with their previous corporate travel booking platform.

The tool they were using only allowed booking one week at a time, so ProVantage’s team was spending hours per week extending reservations — only to often be told that the hotel didn’t have availability or couldn’t provide weekend bookings through the booking tool. In addition to the time spent on extending reservations and dealing with hotels, the process was hard on employees, who were frequently needing to pack up and relocate to a different hotel in the middle of a project.

Additionally, ProVantage was interested in improved security and invoicing to simplify their reconciliation processes. Their search for a better hotel booking and lodging management solution led them to try Engine.

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The Solution

After joining Engine in early 2023, the ProVantage team noticed an immediate difference. With a lodging management tool that was better suited to their needs, rebooking hotels and managing issues was no longer a full-time job.

“The amount of time that we spent booking hotels in comparison to now required an entire full-time, 40-hour-plus week person during our busy period,” said Melissa Sledge, Director of Support Operations at ProVantage. “Now we literally just have one person who’s doing hotel booking on top of five other items that they deal with on a day-to-day basis. I would say a good 40 hours a week has been saved by switching over to Engine.”

There’s less problem-solving to be done too. “We had a lot of issues with our employees showing up to the hotels and finding out that they no longer worked with [the booking platform]. So even though we had a reservation, they weren’t going to honor it,” shared Melissa. “With Engine we have yet to have anybody get turned away from a hotel, so it’s made all of that very smooth.”

In fact, every piece of the process has been simplified and streamlined, including reconciliation.
Melissa’s team loves using the Trends page on her Engine dashboard to quickly locate bookings by traveler name, and how they can use custom fields to capture information up front that will save them time later on. “We really love all of the data that we’re able to get out of the platform,” she said.

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Above all, Melissa appreciates the spirit of innovation that Engine shares with ProVantage. She loves that her Engine Account Manager takes the time to listen to her needs and concerns and find creative solutions to improve their processes.

“One of our core values is ‘innovate to elevate,’ so being able to partner with another company that thinks in that same mindset — how can we make this better to not only elevate our business, but also help elevate somebody else’s business — is huge.”

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The Results

• ProVantage saved $27,804 in the first three months (nearly $10K per month)
• ProVantage earned $6,717 in Engine Rewards in the first three months
• ProVantage can book weeks-long stays for the entire duration up front, guaranteeing their workers a designated room and saving hours of effort on booking
• Improved access to data helps the team more easily filter records by details like traveler name for faster reconciliation
• The Groups team can manage large reservations end-to-end on ProVantage’s behalf

Learn More

Interested in seeing what Engine can do for your business? Get in touch.

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