Technology News South Africa

Travelport, Amazon Web Services team up to optimise the digital transformation of travel retailing

Travelport has announced its new strategic, long-term collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The collaboration will focus on optimising Travelport's recently launched next generation platform, Travelport+, and accelerating innovation in travel retailing and merchandising.
Source: ©Michael Simons via
Source: ©Michael Simons via 123RF

Travelport selected AWS for this strategic collaboration, which unites globally renowned expertise in travel technology, cloud technology, and hyper-personalised retailing, due to its proven travel industry experience, along with its scalability, global reach, and culture of innovation. As part of the collaboration, Travelport and AWS will be launching a new accelerator programme which will incorporate talent from the AWS-affiliated tech startup community.

"The travel industry has struggled to keep up with the pace of change in digital retail," said Greg Webb, chief executive officer at Travelport. "This landmark collaboration is specifically designed to address just that.

"AWS’s retail heritage makes them uniquely qualified to optimize digital retail platforms, simplify complex environments, and enable game-changing innovation in the travel retailing space. With AWS as our preferred cloud partner, we are going to create a simpler, smarter, and better future for travel retail."

As part of the long-term collaboration, Travelport will migrate its global platform that connects travel agencies and travel suppliers to AWS. It will also use AWS technologies, including High Performance Compute (HPC), storage, security, analytics, machine learning and databases to deliver a faster, easier, and more personalized travel booking experience.

In addition, Travelport will use AWS Managed Services (AMS) to provide trusted operational expertise to help optimise platform efficiency and security.

Optimising Travelport+

To optimise the platform, Travelport+ will leverage AWS compute, which will enhance efficiency by enabling Travelport to easily scale capacity for processing while maintaining superior performance for HPC workloads. The company will also speed up content delivery through the platform by leveraging its global network to cache content at “the edge” of the cloud, bringing it closer to end-users anywhere in the world.

"Travelport is using the flexibility, scalability, and reliability of the world’s leading cloud to provide the speed and insights needed to put the customer first," said Adam Selipsky, incoming CEO of Amazon Web Services.

"By leveraging the broadest and deepest set of cloud capabilities and AWS’s proven global infrastructure, Travelport can enhance the performance of its platform and continue to develop new ways to simplify the travel booking experience. With people around the world beginning to return to travel, we look forward to working with Travelport to help the travel industry continue to innovate."

Driving innovation

To accelerate innovation in travel retailing, AWS will further enhance Travelport’s development and delivery model, enabling more rapid speed to market and the production deployment of solutions. This will in turn give Travelport developers the ability to innovate faster and provide expanded access to solutions developed by AWS’s established and startup travel technology community.

Travelport will also use AWS’s world-class capabilities, such as machine learning and advanced analytics, to improve its personalisation offering, leveraging the company’s latest technologies to explore new ways to simplify the way travel is retailed.

On Thursday 24 June, David Peller, managing director, travel and hospitality at AWS will discuss the collaboration with Travelport during the upcoming virtual event, Hello Modern Retailing.

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