Skift Take
Choice's decision to build its own reservation system in-house is a poke in the eye to the many technology companies that sell systems to hotel chains.
Choice Hotels has moved its 6,500 franchisees to a new central reservation system it built in-house.
The tool aims to help the hotel chain — whose 11 brands include Comfort Inn and Econo Lodge — better analyze data about customers and hotel owners.
The Rockville, Maryland-based chain has begun to use the platform to set rates and availability and to manage bookings made via its desktop, mobile websites, and mobile app.
Remarkably, there have been no reports of disruptions, as the company deployed the system on a property-by-property basis in phases in recent months.
The system processes bookings for hotel rooms, meeting rooms, vacation rentals, and vacation package offerings all in one interface — instead of the patchwork of systems the company had used before.
Like other hotel groups, Choice had found that its technology platform had become outdated and was no longer able to support a recent exponential jump in data requests. As more people search for travel online, they are sending more data requests to hotel systems.
Choice's mainframe-based legacy systems — a patchwork of in-house hardware
