Trip.com inspires Asia Pacific travelers with #DreamNowTripLater live video streams powered by Amazon Web Services

When travel began to slow this year, online travel agency Trip.com Group quickly pivoted its marketing strategy, opting to bring travel experiences to its more than 400 million customers via engaging and entertaining content. As part of its #DreamNowTripLater campaign, each week the company selected up to five travel hot spots around the world, where it live streamed video content highlighting the area’s top attractions and hotels. Each locale was carefully selected based on the company’s expansive network of 1.4 million hotels spanning 200 countries and two million flight routes. To ensure an experience that transports viewers to each spot, Trip.com built a video workflow using AWS Media Services, including AWS Elemental MediaLive, AWS Elemental MediaConnect, and AWS Elemental Live, for live video processing and delivery to YouTube, Facebook, and third-party video services across China, in addition to AWS Elemental MediaLive and Amazon Interactive Video Service (IVS) for live video delivery to Trip.com and its mobile application.

Each installment of the #DreamNowTripLater video series explores a new location and includes travel booking incentives. In building its video workflow, technology with global reach was a key consideration. The team needed tools capable of delivering live, low-latency video streams at scale and via multiple streaming protocols. By leveraging AWS Media Services and Amazon IVS, Trip.com was able to easily deploy a robust, live stream workflow, without the traditional overhead of building one from scratch. Thus far, the site’s streams have featured scenic locations across the Asia Pacific region designed to promote travel packages or live video of hotels with available discounts in destinations such as Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, and Thailand, though it plans to continue expanding the covered regions and exploring how it can make its streams more interactive.

“Delivering a compelling video experience is key to capturing and engaging modern travelers, and to achieve this we need a stable, high quality video workflow with extensive streaming protocol support on a global scale. AWS Media Services and Amazon IVS make it easy to stream content across all of our digital platforms, a feat unmatched by other services,” said Bo Sun, CMO of Trip.com Group. “Low latency is also extremely important, as our streams feature limited-time offers. AWS Elemental Media Live and Amazon IVS are indispensable in supporting our customers.”

In closing, Sun shared “Having the ability to customize the parameters of the live video streaming for each platform with AWS services is really powerful. We can quickly launch live video shows from anywhere in the world, and with confidence that the content will meet our high bar for quality.”