The travel and tourism industry has undergone a sea change in the last ten to 15 years, moving from traditional brick-and-mortar travel agents to online travel platforms, and cloud technologies are enabling this change.
GlobalData’s Strategic Intelligence report on cloud computing says that cloud investment by travel and leisure companies will reach $24.4bn in 2028, up from $12.3bn in 2024.
At its core, cloud computing technology accelerates product delivery, thereby reducing the time to market. It is also scalable, meaning companies can pay for the exact storage and computing power they need on a per-use basis.
Investment in the cloud technology stack depends on company size and business requirements. Small and medium-sized travel companies tend to invest in software as a service (SaaS) solutions, which provide out-of-the-box, scalable applications. Larger travel companies invest in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) from public cloud providers, which provide them with the operational benefits of the cloud and the flexibility to build tailored solutions.
Disruptions are inevitable in the travel and tourism industry, whether due to natural disasters, technical failures, cyberattacks, or other unforeseen events. To ensure business continuity and minimise downtime, travel and tourism businesses must have robust disaster recovery plans in place.
Cloud computing provides powerful disaster recovery and business continuity solutions that enable businesses to minimise the impact of disruptions and quickly restore operations. By using cloud-based backup and recovery services, businesses can replicate their data and applications across geographically dispersed data centers, ensuring redundancy and resilience against localised outages or disasters.
For example, consider a hotel chain that relies on a cloud-based property management system (PMS) to manage bookings, guest information, and room inventory. By regularly backing up the PMS data to the cloud and replicating it across multiple data centers, the hotel chain can ensure that its critical systems and data are protected against loss or corruption in the event of a disaster.
Cloud-based disaster recovery solutions provide automated failover capabilities, enabling businesses to rapidly restore services in the event of an outage. For example, if a data centre becomes unavailable due to a power outage or hardware failure, businesses can automatically failover to a secondary data center without disrupting operations or losing data.
