Best Western Hotels & Resorts is moving its infrastructure to Amazon Web Services to automate processes and quickly develop new and more personalized experiences for travelers visiting its more than 4,700 properties worldwide. Best Western will migrate all of its business-critical applications to AWS including its hotel reservation system, customer reward platform and global contact centers, with plans to complete the migration of these applications from its existing data centers by the end of 2020.
Best Western is using AWS services, including analytics, machine learning, database, compute and storage, as well as the expertise from AWS Professional Services, to accelerate the pace of innovation and improve operational efficiency for its member-owners that independently own and operate its hotel properties.
As part of its move to the cloud, the company is migrating its hotel reservation systems off legacy databases to Amazon Aurora (for its primary database needs) and Amazon Redshift (for data warehousing) to increase capacity and enable faster processing of hotel reservations around the world, enabling the company to scale during peak travel booking periods.
The hotel company is planning to use Amazon Connect, a cloud-based contact center service, to better serve customers around the globe who need booking support, along with AWS machine learning services, such as Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Comprehend, to convert speech to text and uncover insights to deliver more personalized customer experiences for guests.
Working with AWS, Best Western is identifying additional ways to use analytics and machine learning services across its entire business, the company said. It plans to use Amazon SageMaker, a fully-managed service to build, train, and deploy ML models, and Amazon Forecast, a fully-managed service that uses machine learning to deliver highly accurate forecasts, to uncover key trends and guest booking patterns in order to offer more personalized recommendations to the nearly 40 million members of its Best Western Rewards loyalty program.
“In recent years we have embarked on a digital transformation that is designed to delight our guests, develop agile ways of working and create new value for guests, hotel owners and employees,” Greg Adams, SVP and chief digital officer for Best Western Hotels & Resorts, said in a statement. “With its unmatched portfolio of services, AWS is a natural fit for Best Western Hotels & Resorts’ move to the cloud, as we focus on improving processes, driving better business results for our member-owners, and delivering even greater value to travelers around the world.”