Duetto’s CEO David Woolenberg enjoyed a Fireside Chat with Joanna Todd, WW Head of Accommodations and Lodging, Amazon Web Services (AWS) at this year’s Virtual Revenue Strategy Forum.
Here’s a brief summary of their conversation.
To hear this interview in full watch the Virtual Revenue Strategy Forum On-Demand anytime.
Can you explain what the AWS travel vertical looks like? What is your core business? How do you serve the industry?
Let’s flashback to what Amazon.com was in 2004. The company realized its scale of business was outpacing its tech capability to run efficiently so we created an IT infrastructure to become more efficient and scaled it as we grew. It was all web-based and was the foundation of what today is cloud computing.
We have a scope of responsibility for the industry as a whole, including airlines, airports, ground transportation, hotels, casinos, cruise lines, etc. The AWS travel vertical is made up of people who come from the industry. This was really important to AWS; we want to make sure what we do is informed by the industry itself. This brings a lot of experience and depth of understanding to the conversations we have with our customers.
Are there any exciting trends you are seeing as you have conversations with your customers?
The COVID crisis has accelerated the industry’s move to the cloud and to innovate and adapt more quickly.
We’ve seen six trends in the last 12-15 months:
Revenue management is the backbone of the industry. Hotels need to lean in with the right pricing for their properties for different room types and customer types. This helps control expenses overall and impacts the bottom line.
And finally, what advice can you offer to businesses looking to start adopting a cloud-based tech stack, and what are the keys to success?
Cloud tech can play a real role in accelerating your business transformation by creating operational efficiencies and improving the guest experience. Those are the two areas where AWS can support the hospitality business.
Working with companies like Duetto, which runs on AWS, is how we are helping to accelerate industry growth.
Adopting new tech can be daunting if you are at ground zero and thinking about where you want to go. And so you need to have a priority conversation about where to start. This could be your call center, for example. It doesn’t have to be an all-in migration.
For revenue management, companies are sitting on a wealth of data today, and quite often this is sitting in siloed buckets. If you can’t access it in one spot and create actionable insights from it in real-time you are at a huge competitive disadvantage. Companies adopting real-time analytics and dynamic pricing are the companies that are going to win in the long run.