Choice Hotels International has closed its last data center, making it the first hotel company to migrate its entire system infrastructure to the cloud via Amazon Web Services. The company expects the move to facilitate responses to real-time market conditions. Being on the cloud enables Choice to update its hotel-facing operations and management tools more efficiently and more completely incorporate artificial intelligence and other cloud technologies.
“By moving all of our systems to the cloud, we’re ensuring that our franchisees have up-to-the-minute access to the latest innovations, saving time and money while providing industry-leading distribution and digital systems throughout the competitive hotel booking journey,” Brian Kirkland, chief information officer for Choice Hotels, said in a statement.
The migration concludes a five-year process and involved decommissioning more than 3,729 servers, with over 300 applications retired and more than 250 applications migrated.
“Choice Hotels leaned in big and early on the cloud, which helped them innovate, scale, pivot, and become a more sustainable business over the last five years,” said Matt Garman, senior vice president, sales, marketing, and global services at AWS. “The hotel company has a cloud-first mindset that permeates every part of their business from improved operations to extraordinary customer service, and we're excited to see what they do next.”
Choice’s work with AWS began in 2015 with the creation of a cloud-based central reservation system, choiceEDGE. At the time, choiceEDGE was the industry’s first new CRS from a hotel company in over 30 years.
“Choice operates at the intersection of hospitality, franchising and technology, and we are thrilled to leverage our cloud-first infrastructure,” said Jason Simpson, vice president of cloud engineering for Choice Hotels. “AWS Cloud was key for us in completing the digital integration of Radisson in record time as well as increasing traffic and booking revenue across our platforms.”