Industry
Travel and Logistics
Data and AI in Travel Industry for a Memorable Passenger Experience
HIGHLIGHTS
- The hospitality industry is undergoing rapid transformation to meet the rising expectations for real-time, hyper-personalised, and seamless guest experiences. Many hotels, however, are constrained by legacy messaging systems that are costly to maintain, and difficult to integrate with modern digital infrastructure.
- To remain competitive, hospitality organisations must embrace cloud-native messaging platforms integrated with agentic artificial intelligence (AI), and intelligent autonomous systems capable of contextual decision-making.
- Modern messaging architectures, driven by event-driven design and containerised microservices, and paired with agentic AI capabilities, can enable intelligent automation, real-time insights, and sustainable operations.
- The transformation transcends technology—it redefines operational strategy, empowering hotels to deliver exceptional, personalised experiences while optimising costs and complexity.
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A shift is imperative
Legacy hospitality messaging systems, built on batch processing and rigid architectures, result in high operational costs, slow response times, and fragmented hotel operations.
These systems lack the agility needed for artificial intelligence (AI)-driven personalisation, automation, and fast integration of new digital services, leading to inefficient guest experiences.
Today’s guests expect seamless, mobile-first interactions throughout their customer journey—right from booking till checkout. To meet these demands, hotels must transition to modern messaging platforms designed for real-time, context-aware communication. This enables faster responses, highly personalised experiences, and streamlined operations.
Traditional hospitality messaging environments depend heavily on manual processes and batch data handling, resulting in limited service agility and slower response times. These systems often suffer from inflexible architecture and poor integration across essential hotel systems.
Primary issues include:
- Heavy reliance on manual data reconciliation, especially during peak times
- Fragmented synchronisation among core hotel systems
- Difficulty integrating new digital services such as mobile keyless entry and loyalty apps
- Limited operational visibility and delayed guest insights
Modern platforms offer event-driven, real-time communication integrated with agentic AI for autonomous and context-aware intelligence, to orchestrate hotel operations intelligently at scale.
Key benefits include:
- Handling millions of real-time events, from bookings to guest preferences
- Real-time integration across property management system (PMS), central reservation system (CRS), customer relationship management (CRM), revenue management systems (RMS), and mobile applications
- Native compatibility with AI tools, analytics engines, and third-party integrations
- Automation of workflows such as service requests, mobile check-ins, and dynamic housekeeping scheduling
A structured, low-risk modernisation approach
Adopting DevOps methodologies and container orchestration enables hospitality businesses to accelerate digital innovation while ensuring consistent performance and reliability across all properties.
Transitioning to a modern messaging platform is achievable with minimal disruption via a structured, three-phased migration:
- Phase 1: Deploy a messaging platform with containerised microservices to decouple legacy systems and establish event-driven processing
- Phase 2: Externalise business logic to scalable rule engines (eg, Red Hat Decision Manager) to enable flexible, automated decision-making
- Phase 3: Enable real-time system interactions and AI-driven personalisation for guest-centric services
Architecture highlights
The reference architecture is engineered for speed, scalability, and intelligence:
- Messaging platform: Robust real-time event streaming and message distribution
- Containerised microservices: Modular, decoupled components for flexibility and high availability
- Kubernetes: Cloud-native orchestration enabling elastic, distributed deployments
- Agentic AI: Context-aware intelligent agents that autonomously make decisions and automate operations
This architecture creates a unified digital fabric, enabling AI-powered workflows, actionable insights, and seamless guest experience enhancements.
Business impact
Modern messaging platforms, combined with agentic AI, deliver measurable improvements for hospitality operations (see Figure 1).
Figure 1
Benefits of real-time workflows
Figure 1
These outcomes help hotels run more efficiently while meeting modern guest expectations (see Figure 2).
Figure 2
Offering personalised guest experiences
Figure 2
Adoption at scale to enable every hospitality brand to modernise
This framework is universally applicable.
It will benefit all hospitality brands—whether a boutique hotel, luxury chain, or multi-property resort group—due to its modular, open, and cloud-native architecture. The phased modernisation journey ensures low risk and high adaptability, regardless of current system maturity or size of operations.
Real-time insights
The future of hospitality hinges on real-time responsiveness, intelligent automation, and seamless digital experiences.
Legacy messaging systems cannot support these evolving demands. By adopting cloud-native, event-driven messaging platforms integrated with agentic AI, hospitality businesses unlock unprecedented agility, operational efficiency, and elevated guest experiences.
TCS stands ready to partner with hospitality leaders on this journey. Our industry-specific accelerators, proven frameworks, and AI-powered platforms enable a smooth transition—turning messaging modernisation into a tangible, strategic advantage.