TALKING

They will need the ability to quickly react to regulatory change and customer confidence and offer richer customer experiences with fewer resources . It is also expected that recovery will not be linear as there is the risk of growth and then further contraction in markets , so this business flexibility will become a necessity .

In this environment , many external factors will significantly influence the change in customer behaviour . However , technology will have a critical part to play in transforming the end-to-end customer experience , with new enforced business processes and enhanced data to drive customer confidence . These are five trends to consider in the new normal in travel and hospitality :

Contactless

Reenvisaging the end-to-end customer experience with increased biometric controls may become the norm . Use of voice and video to drive a contactless experience along with contact tracing may become more prominent . Voice will be used more extensively for information exchange and controls , with image recognition being adopted more widely to automate registration , check-in and moving through security areas .

The active use of this technology is important as organisations establish new working practices and interactions with customers by identifying every touch point of the journey and looking at how security and access controls can be contactless and provide a rich interactive customer experience . For example , when checking in to a hotel , a customer would receive a notification alert of the deep cleaning of a room .

They can confirm and check in on a mobile device , identifying luggage and arrival method , which then provides the virtual room key . Once activated , any access to the room is notified to the customer . On arriving at a hotel , for example in a car , the concierge would have the customer details automatically from the registration . The luggage would be removed from the car and then the customer moves to an allocated car parking space , with no direct interaction .

They can then move through large open reception areas which will track arrival by camera . On entering the lift requesting the floor by voice and contactless scan of the mobile device will enable access to the room . This is a very simple scenario , but identifying every touch point of the journey and looking at how security and access controls can be contactless to provide a rich interactive customer experience .

This will be similar when considering the arrival at an airport , from parking through check-in , border controls through to boarding . How will airlines and airports collaborate to provide a rich , integrated contactless experience ? Elenium , built on AWS , has developed contactless check in and health screening kiosks at airports leveraging several AWS services including Amazon Rekognition . We expect to see measures such as this gain interest across travel , hospitality and beyond .

Flexible working

Working remotely and flexibly for extended periods is , in some cases , demonstrating increased productivity and improved work-life balance . Swapping the daily commute for home working will be accelerated , with other areas of growth such as fitness activities and integrated online , offline experiences . It is expected that where possible , all roles will support some form of flexible working , from a few days a week to full time . This will see the need for more flexible , integrated communication solutions for voice and video with increased use of remote workstations . Managing federated teams requires different techniques to ensure inclusion , motivation , managing isolation and a balanced work schedule to prevent burn out . This requires different collaboration and management best practices . Having capable secure , scalable solutions that need minimal bandwidth and simple low

Paul Armstrong , Principal Solutions Architect , Amazon Web Services

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