Cloud as the gamechanger to reimagine travel and hospitality

The cloud advantage

For travel and hospitality companies, data and analytics on cloud mean greater agility and customer experiences.

Under constant pressure from disruptive business models and competition, travel and hospitality companies are increasingly turning to real-time analytics. It helps them meet the growing demand for competitive pricing in travel and hotel reservations, understand customer preferences, create personalized offers, and optimize operations to efficiently schedule crews and track inventory.

Cloud platforms can help travel and hospitality companies meet this demand for real-time analytics and actionable insights for personalized experiences, business optimization, and more. And with the advanced security leading cloud providers offer, companies can meet the highest standards of privacy and data security. They can secure sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII), financial transactions like credit card payments, and detect potential security threats to websites.

Personalization is key

Enable personalized, immersive experiences with cloud and mixed reality.

Travel and hospitality companies looking to wow their customers with exceptional experiences must also look at the innovations powered by 5G and mixed reality. With its ultra-low latency and high-capacity bandwidth, 5G has the potential to make the world more connected and enable highly personalized and immersive experiences. Visual experiences as we know are changing with mixed reality blending physical and digital, or through digital overlays in real physical environments. Until now, this extension of reality was mostly through augmented reality or virtual reality (AR/VR) glasses or headsets, but the possibilities are many—it could be through contact lenses and other wearables as well in the future.

What does this mean for travel and hospitality companies? They could use wearables like smart lenses with built-in AR-powered visual displays for virtual tours, gamified sightseeing, and hands-free navigation for tourists. Airports and airlines could use smart glasses with facial recognition or head and wrist gear with built-in cameras for faster security scans.

Cloud can help travel and hospitality companies drive more value from these technologies. With its storage and computing power, cloud can help them exchange vast amounts of data gathered from wearables. Insights from the data can be used between connected devices for real-time decision-making and to provide personalized and connected experiences.

Moreover, cloud-based platforms and solutions can enable no-hassles travel and health insurance coverage, easy health-check screenings, contactless payments, and other travel-related assistance and amenities.

Cloud adoption

With cloud at the center, the travel and hospitality industry is embracing new opportunities in a remarkable way.

Let’s look at how cloud solutions can enable companies in travel and hospitality to meet customer and their needs:

• Generate predictive insights: Deliver highly personalized experiences and targeted communications to delight customers and deepen brand loyalty. This requires focused marketing campaigns and tailored recommendations across a variety of channels. For this, companies can leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) services on cloud. At McDonald’s, for instance, cloud technology has enabled a faster, easier, and more rewarding drive-through experience with relevant recommendations based on past orders, location and time of day.

• Drive connected experiences: Deliver omnichannel, reliable, and personalized customer engagement with cloud tools on which scalable web and mobile applications are built and deployed. Customers can achieve seamless, connected experiences across a host of devices with an internet of things (IoT) suite of products. Moreover, computer vision technology can analyze images and videos and aid in identity verification and surveillance during travel. Furthermore, AI chatbots with human-like speech capabilities can engage with customers to manage bookings, field inquiries, collect feedback, and deliver 24×7 automated assistance. For instance, Priceline leveraged cloud for optimized customer service during a 3x increase in call volume.

• Deliver ML-powered forecasting: Help companies meet upcoming demands, offer access to unused compute capacity at discounted prices, and provide serverless technologies with a pay-for-use billing model, resulting in optimized IT costs. This can help the airline industry with forecasting to schedule crew and manage fleet and equipment. Similarly, hotels could predict guest inflow, make inventory adjustments, and release dynamic pricing offers. For instance, Domino’s Pizza leveraged cloud for predictive ordering, increasing the speed of its service delivery Moreover, real-time streaming and data processing capabilities can help build applications to analyze video streams and live feeds from IoT devices. These can detect fraud, improving security and operational efficiency.

• Offer real-time recommendations: Make travel more sustainable by bringing together AI, ML, and IoT devices. This can help monitor fuel consumption, provide recommendations to reduce emissions and optimize routes using AI/ML models to reduce flight duration and fuel consumption. For instance, Qantas Airlines’ cloud-based flight simulator helps to save millions of dollars in fuel costs each year. What’s more, hotels use smart IoT sensors and automated systems for facility management, energy management, predictive equipment maintenance, and water metering.