How to send a POST request to AWS Lambda using Python and MySQL

I have a Lambda function that connects to my EC2 MySQL database and can successfully connect, query and use it to retrieve json data. I wanted to improve on this Lambda function by providing parameters to the query such that I can retrieve the corresponding data using the API gateway and the parameters defined.

The Lambda function retrieves a specific hotel using the ‘hotel_id’. As shown in the first figure, the AWS console can test the Lambda function with the body parameters: "{ "hotel_id": "10717" }" and retrieve the corresponding hotel.

The following is the simplfied Lambda function, ‘handler.py’:

import pymysql  # library for python x mysql
import json     # json library
import requests


# Configuration Values
endpoint = 'secret'
username = 'secret'
password = 'secret'
database_name = 'secret'

# Connection
connection = pymysql.connect(host=endpoint, 
                             user=username, 
                             passwd=password,
                             db=database_name, 
                             charset='utf8mb4', 
                             cursorclass=pymysql.cursors.DictCursor)

##############################
# lambda_handler function
# to return json response from the db query
# using db Hotels, table hotelxml
#############################
def lambda_handler(event, context):
    
    print("EVENT:", event) 
    
    response = event.get('body')
    
#unused vars
    url ='https://vdg8o9gq6i.execute-api.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/dev/fetch_pethotels2'
    headers = {"content-type": "application/json" }

    params = (
    hotel_id := event['hotel_id']
    )

    query = 'SELECT * FROM hotelxml WHERE hotel_id = %s'

    responseBody = ""
    
    hotelList = []
    
    try:
        cursor = connection.cursor()
        cursor.execute(query, params)
        rows = cursor.fetchall()
        
        for row in rows:
            print(row)
            hotelList.append(row)
            print("/n")

        responseBody = json.dumps(rows, separators=(',', ':'))

        response = {
            "isBase64Encoded": False,
            'statusCode': 200,
            'headers': {
                'Content-Type': 'application/json',
                'Access-Control-Allow-Origin': '*'
            }, "body": responseBody
        }
        
    except Exception as e:
        
        response = {
            "isBase64Encoded": False,
            'statusCode': responseBody.statusCode,
            'headers': {
                'Content-Type': 'application/json',
                'Access-Control-Allow-Origin': '*'
            }, "body": responseBody
        }
        
        print("exception occured: {}".format (e))
        
        
    finally:
        #connection.close()
        pass
        
return response

Attempting to retrieve the same query/data using Postman and the browser, I am met with a different result. As shown in the figure below:

In this figures below, I am showcasing the AWS Cloud watch logs of these requests. The first figure shows using the AWS Console working request log and the second figure shows the Postman request log.

AWS Console request Cloud watch Log:

Postman request Cloud watch Log:

Any advice and help is very much welcome. Thank you very much for taking the time to read this.