Choice Hotels International is moving its infrastructure to Amazon Web Services, an Amazon.com company, and will migrate more than 1,000 applications to AWS' cloud-based model.
Choice Hotels, which develops some of its own technology, is moving off legacy systems to help improve performance, scalability and reliability, it indicated, and as the chain continues to expand its international footprint, it will be able to deploy new cloud-based systems globally for enhanced regional performance, availability and fault tolerance, with a goal of creating more value for its franchisees and guests.
AWS already is home to some of Choice Hotels’ primary business applications, including its global reservation system and distribution platform, property-management system and data-analytics platform. The chain has teamed with the Amazon ML Solutions Lab to identify uses for machine learning across its businesses and guide its teams in the development of new machine-learning-enabled features, products and processes. By leveraging AWS machine learning and analytics services, Choice Hotels will be able to tap into data allowing for more personalized experiences for its customers, use trend analysis paired with data analytics to identify systems issues and interpret and resolve those issues without human intervention.
“Choice began working with AWS in 2014. Shortly after, we embarked on the largest IT project in the company’s history to replace our central reservation system and distribution platform with a new cloud-based global solution—choiceEDGE, the industry’s first new [global reservation system] from a hotel company in over 30 years. We have continued to expand our strategic relationship with AWS ever since,” Brian Kirkland, CTO at Choice Hotels, said in a statement. “We closely evaluated several public cloud providers and found that AWS was the best fit for our cloud-first approach, delivering the broadest and deepest portfolio of cloud services and innovating at a faster pace than the rest of the industry. With AWS, we will also be able to leverage the industry’s leading machine learning and analytics services to fuel real-time decision-making across our business and transform the way that we deliver our services to franchisees and customers.”
“As consumer behavior evolves, the hospitality industry is changing rapidly, and customers are pushing an unprecedented volume of room and service requests through digital channels, which is driving leaders to turn to the cloud to transform their customer engagement, service and business models,” Mike Clayville, VP, worldwide commercial sales at AWS, said in a statement. “Choice Hotels was the first hotel company to create its own cloud-based reservation system on AWS for more than 6,900 hotels worldwide, exceeding performance requirements and lowering costs. This gave the Choice Hotels leadership team the confidence to move forward with new initiatives and go all-in on AWS. We are excited to expand our strategic relationship as we work with Choice to embed machine learning and analytics across their business.”