AWS: 21st Century forecasting for the travel & hospitality industry

Forecasting is a decision-making tool that helps businesses cope with the impact of the future's uncertainty by examining historical data and trends. Businesses across every industry need to forecast components of their operations, and that is particularly important, and challenging, in times of uncertainty.

Actionable forecasts in the Travel and Hospitality industry bring particular value: how many guests will arrive and when, how to staff accordingly, adjusting inventory positions, modelling the impact of promotions/events on business performance, optimising pricing/revenue management, and projecting revenue/cash flow.

Forecast too high and the business will be inefficient with resources: likely buying too much product, facing potential spoilage or waste, while also missing opportunities to invest capital elsewhere.

Forecast too low and the company will have missed sales opportunities while decreasing customer experiences and satisfaction levels.

Despite unpredictability, accurate forecasting is critical for Travel and Hospitality companies. A white paper, AWS Travel & Hospitality, explores the resources (a mix of talent and experience aligned by a strong culture), procedures (that support the continuous improvement of the forecasting process) and technology (that enables the capture of genuine patterns and relationships in data, while removing noise) that will assist travel and hospitality companies improve their forecasting to operate better in the 21st century.

Notably, it serves to review improvements in forecasting, the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence, and metrics, to assess a forecast's value, as Wesley Story, enterprise strategist at AWS explains.