Brian Kirkland, chief information office for Choice Hotels International, said his company's migration of tech systems to the cloud is one of the most important changes made in recent years, both saving money and allowing a seamless transition of the work environment at the onset of the pandemic.
Speaking during the American Hotel and Lodging Association's The Forum Speaker Series "Silicon Valley in the Spotlight," Kirkland said the transition to work-from-home in March 2020 would have taken weeks. Instead, the business was operating as needed almost immediately.
"March 13 was the day for us," he said. "Everybody in the world was kind of scrambling to deal with the onset of the pandemic, and because we were in the cloud, we were able to scale up all of our support services instantly so our workforce could focus on trying to help our owners. They weren't worried about how to connect to work or access our systems or even how to communicate with each other. We were able to scale up over night."
Kirkland said Choice made its move to the cloud in 2019 after the company launched a new central reservation system designed to be cloud-based, although systems migration is only halfway complete.
"We've moved a majority of our critical systems," he said, noting executives are pleased with the results so far.
"It continues to deliver business results faster and cheaper than before," he said.
Kirkland said the cloud migration provided nimbleness that was vital to the company.
"We shifted our whole company to focus on our franchisees, which was super important for us at that time," he said. "Without the cloud, honestly that would've taken weeks."
He said the move has allowed the company to make changes quickly, noting there was a three-month period during the pandemic when Choice "rolled out more promotions and changes on our website ... than we had the entire year prior."
"During that time, we were the first hoteliers to go to Book on Google. We were able to roll out new distribution partners pretty easily, actually," he said. "We started to do things with data analytics that weren't really possible in the past."
Srihari Thotapalli, worldwide technology leader for accommodations and lodging at Amazon Web Services, said all stakeholders must align goals to get the most out of cloud migration.
"What we see is the organizations that have the most success, it often comes down to two key things," he said. "First is they should be aligned and fully committed to what they want to get from the cloud and setting clear direction and expectations and building that culture for change."
Thotapalli described having a cloud-based environment as "the new normal" as more companies lean heavily on a remote workforce.
"Being able to provide that elasticity is going to be important," he said.
For all those reasons, Floor Bleeker, group chief technology officer for Accor, said technology is getting a bigger share of attention and experts are getting a more prominent seat at the table at hospitality companies, which he tied to the integration of two relevant trade organizations: Hospitality Technology Next Generation and AHLA.
"Technology has become a real business issue," he said. "It's probably top of the agenda for most hospitality companies these days."