Trip.com Signs Multiyear Deal with Amazon Web Services For AI Tools

Trip.com Group said Thursday that it has selected Amazon Web Services as its “strategic cloud provider” in a multiyear deal meant to drive innovations in travel bookings, personalized recommendations, and customer service. 

China-based Trip.com Group owns Trip.com, Skyscanner, and other travel sites. 

“They are using generative AI in order to reinvent the travel experience,” said Steven Elinson, managing director of Travel and Hospitality at AWS, in an interview with Skift.

“They’re trying to create generative AI-based customer service; they’re trying to change the way that customer search occurs; they’re trying to change the way that flight demand happens.”

AWS is hosting a conference this week in Las Vegas, where it announced the Trip.com partnership as well as a number of other new technologies for the travel industry. 

Elinson noted the value of the multiyear agreement.

“It’s a pay-as-you-go pricing model, so at any millisecond, a customer could say, ‘I’m no longer getting value from their services,’ and they could turn them off.” 

Chao Ma, vice president of Trip.com Group, said in a statement that AWS will “play a pivotal role” in helping the company speed up the booking process, optimize flight pricing, and create personalized travel planning capabilities for consumers. 

Trip.com and AWS: Other Projects

Trip.com Group has partnered with AWS on a number of projects over the years. Earlier this year it said it was establishing a joint innovation lab with AWS with a focus on five areas: AI, flights, hotels, international business, and cloud technology. Projects include developing software for AI-driven customer service, hotel search optimization, and flight ticket demand forecasting.

The partners also said earlier this year that they are developing a four-year education program expected to train 2,000 Trip.com Group employees on next-generation AI and cloud capabilities, including how to develop new cloud-based applications. 

Trip.com Group said it has migrated more than 400 of its business components to the AWS cloud. It claimed in a statement that the move “significantly improved the speed of its air ticket booking system and reduced overall total memory consumption by more than 96%, resulting in substantial cost savings.”

Trip.com Group said in a public filing earlier this year that it hosts services on “both public and private cloud technologies.”

In July, the company said it was developing a proprietary generative AI technology to contribute to its goals of modernizing. It was around the same time that it released an upgraded version of an AI chatbot on Trip.com powered by OpenAI.