Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Choice Hotels International, Inc. (NYSE: CHH) is moving its infrastructure to AWS to boost its technology leadership position in the hotel industry. Choice Hotels, which develops some of its own technology, will migrate over 1,000 applications to AWS, moving off legacy systems to help improve performance, scalability, and reliability. As Choice Hotels continues to expand its international footprint, the company will be able to deploy new cloud-based systems globally in minutes for stronger regional performance, availability, and fault tolerance to help create more value for its franchisees and guests.
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 Hotels 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 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. 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," said Brian Kirkland, Chief Technology Officer at Choice Hotels. "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, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. "Choice Hotels was the first hotel company to create their 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."