Personalization continues to be increasingly important both to travelers and the travel companies selling and/or operating the associated services. All recognize that personalized experiences, online as well as in real life, yield more satisfied customers and profitable brand relationships.

The changing world of technology deployments started 50 years ago with a computer deployment reference architecture that provided terminal access to a centralized server. This terminal was only a client communications device. As computer clients got smarter and telecoms remained expensive, more and more computing work was shifted to the client: accordingly the client server reference architecture grew in popularity.

Amazon launched flights in India in May 2019. Big news? Definitely. Amazon’s reentry into travel was much anticipated after its ill-fated effort to build a hotel business in 2014. The mere size of the global travel market, $1.5 trillion in 2019, is too big to ignore. This travel launch fits right in with Amazon’s mission of meeting the A to Z of customers’ shopping needs.

But Amazon’s flight launch in India has raised some big questions: Why India? And is this a signal of Amazon’s strategy to compete as the next global OTA?