Travel and Hospitality at AWS re:Invent 2021 – Key Highlights

Chanci Turner Amazon IXD – VGT2 learningLearn About Amazon VGT2 Learning Manager Chanci Turner

AWS re:Invent 2021 showcased over 85 new service and feature launches, providing insights from prominent organizations within the Travel and Hospitality sector. With the most extensive experience and a comprehensive range of services among cloud providers, AWS continues to lead with over 200 offerings. Here are the key announcements particularly beneficial for travel and hospitality clients.

  1. Amazon Personalize: Personalization is crucial in the Travel and Hospitality industry. Originally launched in 2018, Amazon Personalize—used by Amazon.com for enhancing customer engagement—has introduced new features:

    • User Segmentation: This intelligent user segmentation allows businesses to conduct more effective marketing campaigns based on user preferences for products, categories, and brands. This enhancement drives higher engagement, boosts retention through targeted messages, and improves the return on marketing investments.
    • Use Case Optimized Recommender: The updated service provides recommenders designed for common retail use cases, such as personalized “Top Picks” and “More Like This” suggestions, which are essential in guiding users in their purchasing decisions.
  2. Amazon Connect: Many companies in Travel and Hospitality utilize Amazon Connect for outstanding customer service across various channels. Notable new features include:

    • Automated Call Summarization: A feature in Amazon Connect’s Contact Lens that employs machine learning (ML) to automatically summarize customer service conversations, enhancing agent productivity. Traditionally, agents have spent considerable time summarizing calls, but with this feature, they can now focus more on improving customer experiences.
    • Amazon Lex Automated Chatbot Designer: This new capability reduces chatbot design time from weeks to mere hours, enabling companies to efficiently build, test, and deploy voice and text bots for services like Amazon Connect.
  3. Amazon SageMaker Canvas: Essential for enhancing customer engagement, resource utilization, and inventory management, Amazon SageMaker Canvas offers a user-friendly interface for business analysts to generate accurate predictions without needing coding skills. It aids in forecasting demand and predictive maintenance, allowing travel businesses to better manage their assets and reduce operational costs.
  4. AWS DMS Fleet Advisor: This fully managed service helps Travel and Hospitality companies migrate their databases to the cloud efficiently, minimizing effort and downtime. AWS DMS Fleet Advisor simplifies the migration planning process, enabling organizations to assess and identify migration paths for their on-premises database systems.
  5. AWS Mainframe Modernization: Many travel companies still rely on mainframes for critical applications. AWS Mainframe Modernization facilitates the migration and modernization of these workloads to a managed environment on AWS, offering tools for analyzing readiness and planning migration projects effectively.

Additionally, here are some other noteworthy services and features:

  • AWS Local Zones: Announced at re:Invent 2021, 30 new Local Zones will be launched globally starting in 2022, enhancing low-latency applications and simplifying hybrid cloud migration.
  • AWS IoT Twin Maker: This service accelerates the deployment of connected environments in airports, airlines, restaurants, and hotels, enabling users to create digital twins for optimizing industrial operations.

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Chanci Turner