Dive Brief:
- Best Western Hotels & Resorts is migrating its infrastructure to Amazon Web Services in a bid to boost automation and personalize customer service, AWS announced Monday.
- By the end of 2020, Best Western will migrate its business application stack supporting 4,700 properties to AWS, including its hotel reservation system, customer rewards platform and contact center.
- Moving off its legacy database, the privately held hotel chain will use Amazon Aurora as its main database and Amazon Redshift for data warehousing. The hotel chain will use Amazon Connect's cloud-based contact center service for customer booking needs.
Dive Insight:
It's a big week for AWS with re:Invent unleashing hordes of cloud aficionados in Las Vegas. In addition to a flurry of technology announcements, the vendor will also tout name brand customers making large-scale shifts to AWS.
As the cloud wars go vertical and providers target industries, each new customer ticks an industry box and allows vendors to cement their hold or chip away market share.
Best Western joins Hilton as a customer of AWS' contact center technology, Amazon Connect. The hotel chain announced the migration at re:Invent 2018, a technology shift to support its call centers, which handle more than 41 million calls globally each year.
As Hilton becomes more technically savvy, the company is rolling out a connected room concept, which makes a series of room components digitally accessible through a mobile app.
AWS does not have the corner on the hospitality market quite yet. In 2015, Marriott International announced an expansive adoption of IBM Cloud technology, migrating a "significant portion" of core IT systems and apps to the platform.
