Plaza Premium Group Goes All-In on AWS to Drive Global Growth
Bangalore: Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced that leading airport hospitality provider Plaza Premium Group (PPG), which serves more than 20 million passengers annually in over 250 locations across 70 international airports globally, has gone all-in on AWS, closing two data centers and migrating the vast majority of its IT infrastructure to the world’s leading cloud to deliver better customer experiences. PPG is leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS services, including networking and content delivery, serverless, blockchain, management and governance, and security, to seamlessly expand its presence to over 500 locations by 2025, including lounges at the 100 busiest airports worldwide, at 40% lower cost. By digitally transforming during the COVID-19 pandemic, PPG is helping its business partners, including airports, airlines, and travel operators, cut overhead costs as travel resumes by efficiently managing their lounges, airport operations, and loyalty programs using cloud technology. With AWS, PPG can also deploy IT services in new lounge locations 20 times faster and innovate new solutions, including the company’s global airport loyalty rewards program.
Before migrating to AWS, PPG was experiencing technological constraints using on-premises infrastructure, which made upgrading architecture, expanding into new markets, and building new customer services challenging. With AWS, PPG can provision infrastructure at new locations faster, reducing the time to roll out new lounge locations from up to four months to as little as one week. In addition, using Amazon CloudFront, a fast content delivery network (CDN) service, PPG improved the performance and stability of its lounge management system, allowing customers to check into PPG’s airport lounges using their smart phones in less than a minute.
PPG is also leveraging AWS to help its business partners succeed. PPG uses Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure application programming interfaces (APIs) at any scale, to make the group’s lounge management system available as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution for its partners. These partners can also gain insights into customer travel and dining preferences to create new personalized offers for airport lounge customers, including travel-related products and services like private lounges access, spa and wellness experiences, and hotel discounts.
To increase customer loyalty, PPG developed a centralized and secure solution on the cloud to host Smart Traveller, the company’s global airport loyalty rewards program that provides international travelers with discounts and special offers from partners in the retail, travel, and dining sectors. Using Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), a fully managed ledger database that allows the company to standardize loyalty point transaction reporting, PPG can share and settle travelers’ loyalty points with partners including retailers, lounge operators, and ground transport and accommodation providers in a transparent, permanent, verifiable, and unchangeable transaction log. With this database technology, PPG enables travelers to earn and redeem loyalty points in real-time for member benefits such as lounge access, limousine transfer, and dining.
“PPG strives to make travel better for millions of customers each year. We chose AWS because of its global footprint, security, and high scalability, which enable us to deploy our hospitality services to new airports faster and forge new strategic partnerships to provide premium airport hospitality,” said Olivia Chang, Chief Information Officer, Plaza Premium Group. “By moving our entire infrastructure to AWS, we have access to their unmatched portfolio of cloud services to develop more innovative, secure and seamless customer services, including our Smart Traveller/Arrture Loyalty Rewards Program that is powered by the Amazon Quantum Ledger Database, a fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log. With QLDB, we can easily verify that there have been no unintended modifications to our data.”
“PPG is taking airport traveler comfort and convenience to new heights with AWS,” said Robert Wang, Managing Director, Hong Kong and Taiwan, AWS. “The leading global provider of airport services has ambitious expansion plans, and AWS provides the scalability PPG requires to meet these ambitions. With AWS’s unmatched suite of cloud services, PPG is quickly rolling out new solutions in a cost-effective way that please customers and make travel better.”