Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced a big customer win in the hospitality industry, with Choice Hotels International Inc. going “all-in” on its public cloud infrastructure.

Choice Hotels, which owns well-known hotel brands such as Ascend Hotel Collection, Cambria Hotels, Comfort, Sleep Inn and Quality Inn, said it’s planning to migrate its entire information technology stack onto Amazon’s cloud.

This will entail shifting more than 1,000 software applications to AWS from its legacy data center systems, Choice Hotels said. This planned, three-year undertaking won’t be simple by any means, but Choice Hotels said it believes that doing so will be worthwhile, as it will ensure benefits including better performance, scalability and reliability of its computer systems.

Choice Hotels already runs a significant portion of its IT infrastructure on AWS since it began its relationship in 2014, a fact that likely persuaded the company to go all-in, AWS’ name for a customer using its infrastructure exclusively. In particular, last year it finished the migration of its core global reservation system to AWS.

Brian Kirkland, chief technology officer at Choice Hotels, told SiliconANGLE that no other major hotel chain has made such a migration from legacy systems to the public cloud, and the first in more than 30 years. He added that after the migration, the company ran into no problems during the peak summer season.

“We looked at the cloud as an opportunity to get off these legacy systems, many of which were built before the internet,” Kirkland said. “It’s a complicated spiderweb to untangle.”

But he said the rest of the industry ultimately will have to go along in order to offer customers services they expect. For its part, Choice is mulling the use of services such as virtual reality to make it easier for guests to order room service or find the ice machine.

The company has also relied on Amazon’s services to help it tap into the benefits of machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence. Choice Hotels used the Amazon ML Solutions Lab to identify a number of uses for machine learning in its business, and has also created several new machine learning-enabled products and features using that service. The main benefit of using machine learning is that Choice Hotels can provide more personalized experiences for its customers, the company said.

Choice Hotels becomes Amazon’s first major new cloud customer of the year, following the likes of Ellie Mae Inc., a mortgage software provider, and MobileEye, a division of Intel Corp. that builds software for autonomous vehicles, which signed up for AWS in late 2018.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: Choice Hotels