Meliá Hotels saves money and improves response time with AWS
Hotel chain Meliá Hotels International (Meliá) operates more than 380 hotels across four continents. The company requires a robust CRS application to be able to manage room inventory, serve availability requests, facilitate bookings, manage loyalty programmes and contracts with tour operators, as well as to provide a superior leisure and business experience.
In the past, Meliá’s CRS application ran on a mainframe computer which consumed 3.742 million instructions per second and meant that the company had to endure four hours of downtime every other week for regular maintenance. Because of this, Meliá was spending money unnecessarily, struggling to develop new products quickly for its sales and operations personnel and had trouble attracting new IT talent.
The company decided to switch to AWS Microservices where it could build a more modern, scalable and cost-effective CRS application. This has resulted in Meliá now being able to process double the availability requests with faster response times. Since migrating to AWS, the hotel chain has seen 60 per cent cost savings and improved its time to market by 75 per cent.
Chris Palomino, Vice President for Global IT, Meliá Hotels International said: “We’ve reduced our compute costs by 60 per cent after migrating to AWS, and that’s seven figures of savings. We have much better technology at a lesser cost.”
The company worked alongside AWS Enterprise Support to plan its migration strategy and benefited from 24-7 technical support. The Meliá team were also able to make use of AWS Professional Services, a global team of experts that helps organisations realise their desired business outcomes when using AWS. The Meliá employees also deepened their cloud skills through about 1,000 hours of AWS Training and Certification courses.
“The commitment of the AWS team has been incredible. The company’s customer obsession is tangible in our business relationship with them,” Palomino added.
The company can now scale up if there is an influx in demand without increasing its response times, meaning that there is an improved customer experience for online booking. This has helped Meliá rank higher on online travel agencies and travel search engines. “If we experience any downtime, our CRS application recovers so fast that we don’t even notice it,” says Palomino.
Meliá has also cut its time to market for new projects by 75 per cent. “Developing new features took us four months to do before,” says Palomino. “Now, it takes us one month to complete new projects.”
Meliá now plans to migrate its enterprise resource planning systems to the cloud and has built its new website completely using microservices and connected it to other parts of the company running on AWS. “The new website is much faster and more relevant,” Palomino says. “Using AWS, we have increased our business agility and improved the whole customer experience.”
