Choice Hotels Moving Infrastructure to AWS

SEATTLE—Choice Hotels International Inc. is moving its infrastructure to Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, to boost its technology.

Choice, which develops some of its own technology, will migrate more than 1,000 applications to AWS, moving off legacy systems to help improve performance, scalability and reliability, the company reports.

AWS is already home to some of Choice Hotels’ primary business applications, including its global reservation system (GRS) and distribution platform, property management system and data analytics platform. Choice 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, the company will be able to provide 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 Hotels is an established leader in innovation, and the migration of the company’s infrastructure to AWS will help build upon Choice’s legacy of technology innovations and industry firsts,” said Brian Kirkland, CTO at Choice. “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 GRS from a hotel company in over 30 years. We have continued to expand our strategic relationship with AWS ever since. 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,” said Mike Clayville, VP of worldwide commercial sales at AWS. “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.”