In many parts of the world, pent-up demand for traveling can be seen after years of COVID travel restrictions. Travelers are eager to explore new places and seek new adventures. While the rate of recovery varies by region and segment, we can be optimistic about the future. Hilton Hotels and Resorts, Marriott International, and Wyndham Hotels and Resorts all reported positive first-quarter results. Expedia Group CEO Peter Kern predicted that summer 2022 would be the busiest travel season following the relaxation of COVID travel restrictions and that prediction has been supported by increased air travel bookings in Europe and the United States.

Despite the scale and duration of the disruption caused by the pandemic, including ongoing labor shortages and rising costs, many travel and hospitality companies have made tremendous strides in embracing digital transformation to innovate how they plan, manage, and operate their businesses over the last two years. Because it is impossible to predict the future, agile and innovative travel and hospitality businesses are making significant inroads toward recovery.

Dine Brands Global, Meliá Hotels International, United Airlines, White Castle, and Wyndham Hotels and Resorts are all reinventing their traveler and guest experiences today. They used cloud-based data and analytics solutions to understand their travelers' and guests' needs and create more personalized interactions with them. These businesses are also optimizing their core operations to efficiently serve guests while restructuring their cost base with cloud technology to provide a long-term cost advantage. AWS teams assist travel and hospitality businesses of all sizes and segments worldwide in improving the guest experience and operational efficiency. Most of them share similar goals and challenges, and their top priority is to create a single view of the customer. 

Personalization

Improving personalization has numerous advantages in every aspect of the customer experience. However, hard to achieve that without a comprehensive and reliable 360-degree view of travelers and guests. Many travel and hospitality companies struggled to achieve this single view of the customer until they moved their data, which was often scattered across multiple sources, to the Cloud. The Cloud enables you to store any type of data from any source and use analytics services with machine learning to understand your travelers' or guests' unique needs, personalized messaging, and offers and use effective communication channels for every interaction.

Customer data is successfully used by Hyatt Hotels to drive personalization and revenue. They store their customer data in Amazon Redshift, a data warehouse service that is fast, easy, and secure. They leverage machine learning and data and analytic services such as Amazon SageMaker, which enables data scientists and developers to rapidly prepare, build, train, and deploy high-quality machine learning models. As a result, they were able to make personalized recommendations to each unique guest. These personalization efforts drove almost 40 million in incremental revenue in less than six months. Personalization also boosts retention and fosters loyalty.

Airlines and hotels have long had loyalty programs. But the recent shift from business to leisure travel has forced them to rethink how to continue to incentivize and reward their customers. Air Canada redesigned their engagement with loyal customers by leveraging multiple AWS services to provide an omnichannel experience, improve their loyalty program, and upgrade their digital app. Now, their customers can pay for flights, ancillaries, and extras with money, miles, or a combination of both. Retailers, for example, can use the Air Canada mobile app to offer promotions, treats, and take-away food purchases at the gate. These changes have led to an increase in the rewards redeemed, which include upsells by 19%. According to Nation’s Restaurant News, 42% of US restaurants announced plans to invest in loyalty programs in 2021.

Customer experience

Travel and hospitality companies use the Cloud, specifically AWS, to provide connected experiences with minimal friction. Over the last two years, many travel and hospitality companies have introduced innovations such as contactless payment, self-service check-in, digital app ordering, and curbside pickup. They are still evolving and improving these offerings to provide guests with the flexibility, control, and time savings they seek.

Dine Brands Global: Applebee's Grill & Bar and IHOP launched multiple initiatives to provide guests with a seamless connected customer experience. They give their corporate staff, franchisees, and frontline employees the ability to make informed decisions based on a 360-degree view of their guests built with business intelligence on AWS. They make it quick and easy for guests to dine off-premise with pay-and-go and geolocation tools to optimize takeout orders.

United Airlines: United Airlines monitors customer wait times at Newark Liberty International Airport using geofences, artificial intelligence, and video analytics built on AWS. They also optimize the utilization of their ground service equipment, which can impact flight arrival and departure times, by using tags and IoT services to monitor the equipment location, routing, use, and availability.

Toronto Pearson International Airport: Toronto Pearson International Airport built a passenger boarding queue system using AWS serverless compute and database solutions, including Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Lambda, and Amazon Aurora, that improved passenger communication, reduced gate workload, and provided additional revenue opportunities.

Amazon Connect

All these innovations reduce guest friction by reducing wait times and providing better customer service. But what about when events don't go as planned or guests require additional assistance? Best Western, Delta Airlines, Jack in the Box, Miami International Airport, and Priceline use Amazon Connect, an easy-to-use, omnichannel cloud contact center service, to transform their contact centers. They can prioritize calls based on urgency, implement call-back features, provide self-service assistance via chat and artificial intelligence, and analyze customer feedback. They could scale up or down as needed based on demand and equip agents remotely. In fact, Priceline enabled over 1000 remote agents overnight when COVID began, and their offices were shut down, ensuring they were able to adapt and continue to serve their travelers.

Operations enhancements

Travel and hospitality companies are also looking to reduce guest friction through core operations enhancements. Companies can quickly increase efficiency, cut costs, and achieve other operational objectives, such as better safety and security with the AWS Cloud. Companies that store their data in the AWS Cloud can quickly build models and reports with AWS analytics and machine learning services to develop forecasting, reduce waste, optimize operations, and predict maintenance needs to prevent downtime and costly equipment repairs.

White Castle uses customer data, IoT, automation, and artificial intelligence to streamline operations. Flippy, the robot they are deploying to manage the fryer stations, allows their teams to focus on creating memorable moments for guests.

Qantas significantly reduced fuel costs through an in-house flight analytics initiative called project constellation, built on AWS. They can create optimal flight plans to avoid headwinds and take advantage of time-saving tailwinds while traveling from point A to point B.

Ryanair also uses machine learning on data stored in its AWS data lake to improve operations across the board, optimizing tailor allocation, scheduling, and dynamic pricing. Their machine learning tool, Panini Predictor, can predict the amount of food required on board, reducing waste.

Wyndham Hotels and Resort's decision to partner with AWS as their sole cloud provider has led to enhance business performance across multiple functions.

Meliá Hotels International has moved workloads to the Cloud, including its central reservation system and other applications. They also migrated from their legacy mainframe to the Cloud after 20 years. Meliá was able to become more agile, accelerate innovation across its business, and reduce costs by upgrading its infrastructure. When demand ceased during the pandemic, they immediately reduced costs by 58%.

All these examples and customer stories are possible because of the Cloud, AWS in particular. Most businesses begin the digital transformation to improve the traveler and guest experience through modern technology and lower infrastructure costs. As these businesses enhance business processes and procedures through efficient, effective, and resilient technology, they seek to modernize more application systems and solutions in the Cloud.

AWS travel and hospitality competency partner program

A list of dedicated travel and hospitality competency partners is available to assist you in accelerating your digital transformation. Finding the most qualified partner can be difficult and time-consuming. The AWS travel and hospitality competency partner program is designed to provide customers with a one-stop shop for connecting with the best technology and consulting partners who build and accelerate the delivery of cloud solutions on AWS. It enables customers of all sizes and segments to maximize their cloud investment by collaborating with AWS partners who have proven technical expertise and customer success. Travel and hospitality competency partners must go through a rigorous validation process that includes a third-party audit and vetted customer references in one or more of the following categories: data 360, digital customer engagement, smart assets, and core applications. Customers of AWS have successfully collaborated with travel and hospitality competency partners to migrate individual or multiple workloads applications and services in days.

To learn more about our travel and hospitality competency partners, visit aws.com/travel

Reference:

AWS Events: Industry Innovators 2022