AWS re:Invent recap: A transformative year for travel and hospitality

AWS re:Invent 2023 made history for travel and hospitality at Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS launched over 100 new services, features, instances, and AWS Region expansions. Many of these technological advances will help the travel and hospitality (T&H) industry enhance the traveler and guest experience, improve employee experiences, and optimize operations.

Companies such as Air Canada, Booking.com, BWH, Cathay, DoorDash, United Airlines, and Trip.com shared how they’re using AWS services and solutions to boldly reshape and reimagine travel.

In this blog post, we explore some of the service launches from re:Invent that are key to unlocking elevated experiences for travelers, guests, and employees and share how your industry peers are using AWS cloud, data, and generative AI.

Elevate traveler and guest experiences with Amazon Bedrock

Delivering unprecedented levels of personalization is dependent upon data, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI). At re:Invent, several customers shared how they are using Amazon Bedrock, a service for building and scaling generative AI applications, to provide a more seamless and enjoyable journey.

Delta Airlines

One brand using AI to build solutions for travelers is Delta Air Lines. Adam Selipsky, AWS CEO, highlighted a new customer service tool that Delta built on Amazon Bedrock to answer passenger questions in a more conversational style. For instance, it can respond to questions ranging anywhere from as simple as “How many bags can I check on a Delta flight?” to something more complex such as “Can I carry a pet with me in the cabin to Jamaica?”

Accor

Accor S.A., Europe’s largest hospitality company, is another company using ML and generative AI solutions from AWS. They’ve launched a first-of-its-kind Travel Assistant, incorporating an intuitive conversational interface that empowers guests to find the best experiences according to the style of travel they prefer, transforming the entire booking journey from inspiration to after their stay.

Travel Assistant’s generative AI can recommend more than just hotel locations and facilities; it uses millions of online sources with information and trusted reviews to compile the most relevant local attractions across shopping, food, and entertainment.

Personalize the customer journey with Unified Profiles for Travelers and Guests on AWS

While the preceding examples demonstrate how generative AI can elevate the traveler experience, the key enabler for personalized experiences is data. Many T&H customers have a plethora of first-party customer data that can be used to train generative AI models, making them more effective. However, the data is often siloed and might differ from system to system.

AWS launched a solution that’s purpose-built specifically for the industry—Unified Profiles for Travelers and Guests on AWS (UPT). UPT is a customer data unification solution that automatically sources, merges, and centralizes traveler and guest data from multiple core systems in weeks rather than months. It uses both rule-based and AI-based identity resolution to de-duplicate profiles, ensuring companies have an accurate single view of the customer.

Choice Hotels International

Michael Bennett, Distinguished Software Engineer at Choice Hotels International, shared how they’re using UPT. Choice Hotels loaded 108 million customer profiles into UPT, resulting in 435 million objects (phone, addresses, loyalty information, and so on). From there, UPT ran matching rules against name, phone, email, and booking ID, which resulted in 18 million matches. AI-matching then found another 7 million matches, significantly reducing duplicate data.

Noha Abdalla, Chief Marketing Officer, Choice Hotels International, said, “We’ve been able to move along in our journey of customer identity resolution and not just get more certain about who we’re talking to, but also pull in disparate pieces of data. We’re able to get a more complete picture of who we’re talking to and that allows us to enact more sophisticated campaigns and offers to our customers.”

Redefine the employee experience

Employees play a vital role in providing outstanding travel and hospitality experiences, and ultimately in the success of your brand.

A new service launched at re:Invent that can benefit the T&H industry is Amazon Q in Connect. Amazon Q in Connect is a generative AI-powered agent assistant that understands customer intent and uses relevant sources of information to deliver accurate responses and actions for the agent to communicate and resolve unique customer needs, all in real time.

Ryanair

John Hurley, CTO at Ryanair, shared that they plan to use generative AI to improve how they provide information to their customer service agents. With an easy-to-use chatbot, Ryanair employees can ask a question and instantly receive an answer, instead of combing through dense training manuals and videos.

IHG

Amazon One Enterprise is another way that AWS is bringing experiences from employees’ everyday lives to the workplace. Amazon One Enterprise replaces the need for multiple authentication methods by allowing employees to use their palm to access physical spaces and digital assets.

IHG Hotels and Resorts is testing Amazon One Enterprise as a replacement for badges and manual review of guest IDs. “With Amazon One Enterprise, our goal is to offer employees a new and convenient way to identify themselves and gain access to our software systems by hovering their palm over the Amazon One device. This approach will streamline the way we authenticate, give staff access to the tools they need, and make access easier than ever for them,” said Nick Krieble, global head of Identity and Access Management, IHG.

Improve operational efficiency

Improving operational efficiency can reduce costs, but most importantly, it can also improve the traveler and guest experience. Several T&H customers shared how they plan to use AI to streamline their operations and the customer experience.

Manchester Airport Group

Nick Woods, CIO at Manchester Airports Group (MAG), shared his vision for the automation of airports across all stages of a journey. MAG uses computer vision and AI to monitor and react to events in near real time. For example, they use Amazon SageMaker to quickly deploy AI models to AWS Panorama devices on the edge. They can then train the model to recognize objects, such as planes and people, and return the timestamps for when an action is taken. This allows them to predict when a flight will miss its slot, so they can take corrective action to minimize disruption.

United Airlines

Many times, flight delays or cancellations are beyond an airline’s control. To improve the customer experience during these times of disruption, United Airlines has developed several tools and services to help their passengers get assistance.

United shared how they use generative AI services from AWS paired with their own internal data and structures to provide alternative travel paths. For example, a business traveler needs to be in Savannah for a meeting by a certain time, but there are no available flights in. The United tool uses generative AI to find a flight that lands in Charleston in time for the passenger to drive to the meeting location and suggests that travel path. United worked with AWS T&H Competency Partner, TCS, to create this end-to-end integrated solution for both travelers and agents, ensuring both parties have the same single source of information.

An exciting year ahead for T&H

With hundreds of announcements and thousands of customers, this post captures just the surface of the innovations being led by travel and hospitality customers using AWS services and solutions. And we expect to showcase even more innovation in 2024 as more companies explore the power of generative AI.

See the following links to learn more from your industry peers or explore the new services.

AWS re:Invent session videos featuring T&H customers

Service launches

Elevate traveler and guest experiences

Redefine the employee experience

Improve operational efficiency