How MoEngage and AWS help Travel & Hospitality Brands Use AI to Fix the Customer Expectation Gap

Well, hello to all of our audience. Welcome to Industries Live here from the Amazon Web Services Partners team. Now, this is a show we stream every other Tuesday, so I'm sure some of you have been on the show before. This is where we get to talk to really interesting, super AWS partners that have solutions specifically addressing our industry needs.

And we get to hear firsthand from them about the trends they're seeing from customers within their industries and about how they've built differentiated solutions running on AWS to address those industries' most pressing needs. My name's Claire Ward. I'll be one of your co-hosts today, and I'm a specialist from our travel and hospitality industry. I'm really excited that we get to bring you a session focused on the customer experience today.

Now, I'm broadcasting from sunny Las Vegas today, and we have our live chats open. So if you'd like to see where our viewers are tuning in from, and if you'd like to share any questions during the session, please do so. And now I'd like to introduce my co-host and colleague, Ted Evers. Ted, why don't you say hello to everyone and tell us more about the theme of this episode?

Thank you, Claire. Hi, everyone. I'm Ted Evers. I'm the Global Partner Leader for Travel and Hospitality at AWS.

And this episode is really about how our partners are helping travel and hospitality brands elevate the traveler and guest experience. And, you know, solutions in this space are equally applicable across all consumer industries. But in a world where consumer expectations are even more demanding, we're excited to showcase some solutions that can help you transform your customer experience. So to set the stage, we've got Rohit Nair from the SVP of Marketing at Moengage and Nick Ippel, the Director of Partnership Sales for North America at Moengage.

Welcome, Rohit and Nick, and glad to have you with us today. So if you could quickly introduce yourselves for the audience, we can kick things off. Thanks, Ted. Hello, everyone.

Thank you for having me on the show. I head the marketing function here at Moengage and have been in the enterprise SaaS marketing space for more than 15 years with my previous students in some of the leading enterprise SaaS companies like Sprinter and Fishbox. Hi, everybody. My name is Nick Ippal.

And as Ted said, I lead our North America alliances and partnerships team. I've been with Mo Engage for about four and a half years and have lived in the US and worked in the US as well as in the Asia Pacific region for about 15 years. So I have been able to travel internationally for more than half my life, but currently streaming from sunny and humid Miami. So thank you so much for having us.

As opposed to sunny and dry Las Vegas. Exactly. Wonderful introductions. Thank you both.

Now, I've known you, Roy, and Nick for quite a while and loads of your colleagues at the MoEngage team as well. So, very excited that we've got this opportunity to tell our audience all about MoEngage. Roy, I'm going to kick off with you. Why don't you give us an introduction to MoEngage and a quick overview of what you do?

Sure. Thanks, Claire. And if you can bring up the slide. MoEngage is an AI-native customer engagement platform trusted by global enterprise brands across financial services, travel and hospitality, retail and e-commerce, amongst other verticals.

We help marketing and product teams within consumer brands to quickly evolve, to quickly adapt to the evolving customer expectations, to real-time insights and personalized cross-channel communications. With over 1300 global brands, we've been recognized by leading analyst firms like Gartner, IDC, Forrester, and also as a customer choice in Gartner's peer insights. With 50 plus travel and hospitality brands trusting us, we're also certified AWS ISV partner for the travel and hospitality.

Super, Ted, do you want to jump in? Yeah, absolutely. You know, so at AWS, we have the good fortune of working with a number of the top leading travel and hospitality brands. And one of the things that we continually hear from their leaders is that customers are expecting more that could possibly be delivered.

So, Rohit, could you help define the customer expectation gap for us? Yeah, absolutely. I think, and I would probably start with three numbers, right? number one 71 percent 71 percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interruptions and 76 percent that's three out of four say they get frustrated when brands don't that's the mckinsey research it's the bar your travelers are holding up youtube number two Two, 14% Skift surveyed about 350 plus travel leaders across airlines, hotels, and travel tech last year.

And only 14% said their customer data is fully integrated across teams. So everyone on this call knows the bar. Roughly one in seven actually have the foundation to reach it. Number three, 12.

5%. And here's where it gets sharper. In a separate study of about 800 hotel and airline professionals, 80% said their company is using AI in some form. But only 12.

5% feel confident they can scale AI across their businesses. Everyone is buying AI. Almost no one trusts it yet. The reason, same as point number two, the data underneath isn't ready.

That is the customer expectation gap. Not a soft problem, not a future problem. It's costing brands right now. Those are some crazy stats.

So we all want personalization, but most of our brands don't have the data joined up and also are not using AI to deliver on it. It's interesting, you know, reflecting on my own experience. So I've been in trouble over 30 years now. Of course, I started at the age of 21 like we all did.

But we've talked about the customer expectation gap since the day I first joined this industry. And I think one of our challenges is as a brand, as soon as you deliver something new, the expectation goes up because it becomes part of the normal part of the service. So we have to continue to evolve. But I also feel that the cause of the gap is changing.

So Nick, I'm going to hand over to you. What do you think is causing this expectation gap now? Yeah, it is growing, right? I believe that there are three reasons for this increasing customer engagement gap.

I think we're all experiencing it too. But the first is the AI armed traveler, right? I think we're all using AI in our travels. We not just like it not just becoming valuable It actually integral to our travel process you know I personally planning on travel for a can lions in a month or so and like using Gemini to check with Claude to check with chat GPT right so your customers are now showing up to your websites already having had conversations with these AI tools about what they should do and where they should go.

So essentially they're being pre-personalized by somebody else. And they're now judging you as a, as a brand against that, that bar. So that's like, for me, then like the number one thing that I think is different these days. The second is premiumization and or plus value seeking at the same time.

Right. So that middle is shrinking. So luxury travelers are wanting that exclusivity. They're wanting that personalization at a much higher rate.

And then the, well, at the same time, the budget travelers want that value and flexibility on the lower end. So those both, I guess, both ends of that segment are expecting the brand to know them, i.e. that personalization, right?

So generic marketing doesn't work for either anymore. And then finally, this is something that Mo Engage really kind of talks to as well, but that channel fragmentation where travelers research you on the mobile web and they read reviews on social or they ask chatbots about pricing and then they book on a desktop and then they'll go in and check in and do all the pre-trip ops within the app or whatever. Right. So if your engagement isn't unified across all of those touch points, that experience feels broken.

If your email is different than your web experience, it just feels broken, even if each channel is is being kind of run, you know, at best of class. Right. That that still breaks at the end. So now can I like kind of go into a couple of those examples?

Like, you know, I think, you know, I won't talk too much about this, but I think we've all experienced this. right? Like a loyalty member books their fifth, you know, or, or, or six flight or stay. And then they're given like a generic, you know, welcome email.

Right. Or for me, this is my, I irks me, but like a premium frequent flyer with status gets the same kind of upgrade offer, right. As somebody who's like a first time traveler. And probably like my biggest pet peeve, right.

Is, is customer service issues. You're on the website, the customer service agent doesn't know, you know, that you were there trying to book your flight and have to go through that whole kind of of pre-auth process again and explain the problems again. It's like, just know who I am, right? I was just there, right?

I was just talking to somebody. So being able to kind of bring them all together is like vital. You know, each one of those is like really small, but when you stack them across millions of journeys, you get a brand that feels generic, right? And in a market where personalization is the product.

So yeah, I think our philosophy is like, you know, the gap, you know, isn't a strategy problem. I think every leader on this call has a strategy. It's an execution problem. And so I think that's where AI can really change the game for execution.

Those are some great examples, Nick. You know, a couple of things resonated there. One was, I heard recently the Marriott CEO talk about the bifurcation in the market, right? So you talked about the budget versus versus the luxury and it even gets more complicated when you think that you know not all travelers travel the same way each time right so i might i might have a luxury trip with with my wife but on something else if it's a family might be more budget oriented so that also that's where personalization also comes in very very handy so i mean you enroll in mo engage you get to work with a lot of travel and hospitality brands globally so you've got a front row seat into all this personalization and the engagement.

So, you know, today, what does modern customer engagement actually look like in practice? And how are some of the brands closing the gap there? Yeah, and maybe start there and we'll probably kind of talk about it. I think we'll cover some part about this as well.

The ones, Ted, which we see are closing the gap have four capabilities in comp, right? And before I go there, you know, we know for a matter of fact, customers and premium personalized guest experiences built into their customer journey. From a brand's perspective, this means moving from a transactional to a relational mode. And for this to happen, it all starts with having a unified real-time view of the traveler.

web behavior, app behavior, booking history, loyalty status, contact center interactions in one place, updated in real time. Not a quarterly data warehouse support. The moment a traveler abandons a booking flow on mobile, the email system knows about it, right? So let's look at an example.

And if we can get a slide up here, from one of our customers, one of the largest budget hotel chains in the UK with 600 plus hotels across UK and Ireland and Spain. They wanted to move beyond basic booking confirmations to offer premium personalized experiences tailored to the diverse traveler personas from, let's say, solo business travelers to families. By utilizing Boeing Gage's AI-powered automations, they ingested guest data to trigger highly contextual pre-arrival messaging, such as targeted breakfast upsells, seamless one-click directions to the property.

This automation from a journey perspective led to an 87% click-through rate on pre-arrival emails and a staggering 354% year-over-year increase in post-booking email If I look at a second example, where brands, or rather the second capability, right, it's brands essentially moving towards predictive segmentation and not just demographic, right? If you look at modern segmentation, it's all about intent and behavior. It's no longer about age or zip code where someone resides in.

Who's likely to book in the next 14 days? We all know Nick is probably traveling his town's visit. So, you know, the traveler, the T&H brand should actually be knowing Nick is planning his travel to Kansh. Who's at risk at churning out of the loyalty program?

Who responds to discount offers versus experiential upgrades? AI builds these segments dynamically and they update themselves. And I think Nick can cover a few more from his vantage points. Yeah, absolutely.

Another one would be cross-channel orchestration with AI in the loop. Obviously, we can't go more than 30 seconds without mentioning it. But email, push, SMS, WhatsApp, in-app, web, same journey, different channel. Chosen automatically based on where the customer responds, like at the edge, contextual channel level intelligence, instead of using rules-based kind of segmentation.

So AI decides the channel the timing the content variant and the marketer decides the journey and AI runs that And so it AI marketer plus AI Marketers do not go away They enabled to do more with AI right And so really that turns into one-to-one personalization at scale using AI. And if we could throw up the slide, there's one example that I'd love to just talk through a little bit. So there's a large US-based resort casino. know, they partnered with MoEngage to overcome the fragmented data silos and the manual marketing processes that typically happen when you have some of these larger or some of these more antiquated technologies within the stack.

And that really does hinder that personalized guest outreach experience. So when they did adopt MoEngage, they did adopt that unified platform, they were able to successfully automate the cross-channel marketing campaigns, enabled real-time behavioral-based messaging. Yeah, and then this digital transformation allows that resort to extend its signature hospitality beyond physical walls and laying the groundwork for that really hyper-personalized one-to-one guest experience that we all want and love.

So I love that example. And then lastly, my personal favorite, but generative AI for content at the speed of segmentation. This is the new one. This is, for me, the unlock that I think a lot of brands out there really, really will be able to start utilizing.

But the reason why brands only have five or build five segments instead of 50 is that no one has the bandwidth to be able to write copy, right, for 50 segments. Generative AI changes that. So headlines, subject lines, push copy, image variants, it's all produced and tested at the granularity of the segment. And, you know, our take, the Mo Engage take is, and we built what's called Merlin AI for that exact reason.

Marketers tell it the audience, tell it the goal, conversion goal, whatever goal it is. And it produces that segment. It produces the copy in the voice of, right, with the likelihood to engage with, you know, Taylor Swift or whatever it is where that behavioral data kind of lives. And it creates the creative variance as well.

And it will show you it in minutes, right? So, yeah, unified data, predictive segments, orchestrated channels, generative content, connected service. When you have all of those things, all those four things together, that's where the gap closes. Most brands typically have only, you know, only one or two.

That's quite something. And, you know, I relate to that so much. And this is where I think AI is your friend, because, I mean, for me, if I sit back and think about when you engage across different channels, You can be doing a web chat and whether that's in a marketing concept or another engagement concept, and then you can get on the app and then you can call the contact center. And every single time it's like, who are you and what's your problem or what am I talking to you about?

And it always starts again. And we would love to see this industry go truly on the channel. And so I think here this is where AI becomes our real friend. It's one of those things that can really help in this space.

and AI was the last topic you talked about. But what about the agentic shift? What does that mean for our travel and hospitality brands? Rohit, why don't I give you that question?

Sure, thanks, Claire. And I think, to be honest, AI agents today is probably the most overloaded phrase, right? If you look at chatbots, right, they respond to prompts. You ask the answer.

Agentic AI is different. It's probably seen family, but a different species. It plans, decides, and executes multi-step tasks, searching, holding inventory, rebooking, paying without you in the loop for each step. Now why does this matter today and not next year?

If you look at a study by IDC, it predicts that by 2030, 30% of travel bookings will be executed by AI agents, not by humans on websites. That's the IDC Futurescape 2026 report. McKinsey's Travel Practice puts out a piece last year, arguing that this is the biggest tech upheaval in the industry since ODAs themselves. Whether you agree with the timeline or not, the direction where we are heading is quite clear.

And brands experimenting now are the ones which would be writing the playbook. Let's take an example, right? Brands are potentially looking to leverage agents to not just answer FAQs, but actually resolving issues, rebook flights during disruptions, process refunds, for example, issuing vouchers, managing check-ins, just some examples, right? And why it matters from a marketer's perspective, right?

What does it mean from a marketer's perspective? The marketer today is no longer designing a campaign. they are designing rules and goals and the agent runs the campaign on the customer's term in the customer's moment and that's a shift that we are we are seeing uh kind of come through in today's world and goodness I couldn't agree more I mean the shift to AI agents um I think about my own world and I use um AI agents every single day for everything that I want I don't think I've used traditional search in months now and i'm sure a lot of our audience would would say the same thing where we're constantly yeah they are our new best friends and new assistants um so given how critical ai energetic marketing is shaping up to be how should brands look to reimagine their marketing stack what do you think brands should be doing yeah i think if i take this right so we spoke about the importance of data and fragmentation when we started this discussion right and it's very important that brands reconsider their existing legacy martic stack and start modernizing this fact which becomes very critical for ai to operate at the end of the day uh and i would like to give an example of uh and if you can bring the slide up here yeah i would like to give an example of one of the largest hospitality company that decided to move from a legacy system which was causing a lot of financial leakage and operational friction.

They choose MoEngage to overcome reliance on costly third-party vendors that decided, you know, which was impacting personalization and design at the end of the day. MoEngage enabled them to automate omnichannel recovery sequences, orchestrate campaigns in 17 languages, and deliver dynamic recommendations using individualized user scoring. The win highlights Mo Engage's superior flexible dynamic personalization and self-service capabilities, which is just a starting point for brands to start using AI in a lot of way, right?

Because as we discussed, the underlying data architecture is what matters And when that is shifted from a legacy to a modernized architecture that when the magic of AI comes through I love it. Thanks, Rohit. You know, we think back about, you know, to Claire's point about how so many of us are using AI agents at Agentic Search, et cetera, in order to find travel experiences. and we know that it's still early, but that the rise is almost, I use it, it's like similar to social media, right?

Where in the early stages, people were saying, oh, it's just a diversion. It doesn't really have any impact on bookings or marketing. And now look at where we are today. So I think with the rise with Gentic, it's really causing people to experiment very early and so that they can get a seat at the table with whatever happens and how it's quickly evolving.

So when we're moving so fast and towards more of a real-time AI-driven experience, why is that relationship between the engagement layer and that underlying cloud architecture, why is it so important to a brand's ability to innovate quickly? Nick, you have any thoughts to share on that? Absolutely. Thanks, Ted.

That is the billion-dollar question, or maybe more, that we're all trying to figure out. But in travel and hospitality, that real time isn't just like a buzz. It's a buzzword. It's the baseline, right?

Like traveler flight is delayed. We do not want an email four hours later, right? We need that hotel voucher. Ideally, the flight change options immediately, right?

That exact moment. And then that's like, that's a moment of like customer delight. If it's all seamless, obviously poor experience, but turn into, wow, the app, that the airline was able to just make this problem solved in such an easy way. So to make that happen, you need that relationship between your engagement layer, which is MoEngage, and the underlying cloud architecture, which is AWS, to be seamless.

So it has to be. So think of it as like a high performance car. Now, MoEngage is the driver or the dashboard, and AWS is the engine and the chassis. And if the engine can't handle the speed, the driver is stuck, right?

So by building Moan Gage on top of AWS, we provide the brands with two things that are typically in conflict, which is massive scale with extreme agility. So those are the two things that we love. But first, it's about reducing the IT dependency. Historically, if marketers wanted to launch a campaign, a real-time campaign, they'd have to wait for days for the IT teams and data teams to give that data to be able to execute.

But yeah, with our cloud native solution, we're able to remove those silos and execute those campaigns in minutes instead of months. So I think that's like the biggest change there and the reason why. And then the second is obviously the synergy between the two, how that impacts the bottom line. So AWS allows us to process billions, if not trillions of data points at near zero latency.

And that can help move brands from that traditional broad-based batch and blast type of marketing of the yesteryear into more hyper-personalized one-to-one engagement that hopefully the consumers don't even realize is happening, right? And so this precision reduces CAC, your cost of customer acquisition, because you're not wasting millions or spend on all those irrelevant messages that do cost inherent money as well from an organization. So, yeah, ultimately, it's your engagement layer and your cloud or your cloud architecture.

They're speaking that same language. They're connected. You're not fighting those two things. You're able to focus on the customer.

Right. And that's how you drive those business outcomes, revenue outcomes. And that's what we're seeing with some of the world's biggest and most progressive travel brands to date as well. awesome.

Super, I love that car analogy. I'm a big fan of Formula One, so I'm not going to forget the driver and the dashboard and the engine and the chassis that's going to stick with me for quite some time there. And what a super insightful discussion. I can't believe our time's nearly up.

We've just got one or two minutes left. And perhaps, Rohit, can you summarize it for us? If for all of our audience, that we covered so much material today, what would be the top three takeaways that you would like them to be thinking about? Yeah, sure thing.

Thanks, Claire. I think if you look at the top three takeaways, it starts with every travel and hospitality brand realizing the customer expectation gap is costing them now. It's not in the future, it's now. Closing this gap essentially requires four core capabilities.

Number one, which we discussed, a unified real-time traveler view, predictive segmentation, cross-channel orchestration, and what Nick mentioned was generative content at scale. And last but not the least, if you look at brands that want to stay ahead, they must start shifting now, ensure they have a partner that understands AI and the deep integration needed between engagement and architecture. if brands don't shift now like we discussed previously they're not writing the playbook they'll be the followers right so I think it's important that all the brands that are there on this call are watching this realize the importance of making the shift now than waiting for the next year wonderful and I think you've got a little slide if anyone would like to learn more there we go.

If anyone would like to get in touch with Nick or Rohit, here's the QR code. Take a quick copy now because we've just got a minute or two left. And just to say, guys, thank you so much. I really did learn a huge amount during this session today.

It's really exciting. I've really enjoyed the journey of working with Mo Engage. I know we're going to have an awful lot more time and sessions together over the years to come. And just to say thanks to all of our audience.

Thank you for joining the first half of Industries Live today. We will be back in just a moment when we switch over to our second half of the live stream and we'll welcome our guests from Chile onto the stream. So don't go away. We'll be right back.

Thank you.