Choice Hotels International has closed its last data center and completed its full migration to the cloud.
Announced on January 29, the hotel chain is now using Amazon Web Services' (AWS) cloud for all its operations.
The migration has been a five-year process and involved decommissioning more than 3,729 servers, retiring over 300 applications, and migrating more than 250 applications.
It is hoped the migration will help the company update its operations and management tools, and enable it to use artificial intelligence (AI) and other cloud applications to "drive profitability and enhance the guest experience."
"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," said Brian Kirkland, CIO for Choice Hotels.
"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, SVP of 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 Hotels began working with AWS in 2015, at that time looking to create a cloud-based central reservation system, ChoiceEDGE. By 2019, the company had announced its commitment to being 100 percent on the AWS cloud.
Choice Hotels is based in North Bethesda, Maryland, and owns over 7,500 hotels globally. Originally founded in 1939 as Quality Courts United, the company has undergone several name changes. Choice claims to have had the first hotel website with real-time rate and availability information, in 1995.
The company previously moved away from on-premise data centers to colocation solutions in 2013 with Raritan.
Little information about the chain's previous data center footprint is available. DCD has contacted the company for additional information.
In 2022, Choice finalized the acquisition of Radisson Hotels Americas for $675 million. Kirkland told CIO Dive in September 2023 that his company was not "keeping very much from the Radisson tech stack. My job was to move them into our systems as fast as possible, not to try to tie the two systems together," he said at the time.
Kirkland went on to say that he would "frame one of the servers as a homage" when the final data center was decommissioned.
Other businesses to have migrated to AWS in recent months include the US stock exchange Nasdaq, which is still progressing with its move. Nasdaq migrated its bond exchange in September 2023, two years after first announcing its intention to move to the cloud.
Zurich Insurance Group is also looking to move 100 percent of its operations to AWS, with a migration of its first 1,000 applications expected to be complete by the end of 2025. Credit reporting agency Experian is also accelerating its AWS migration.
