Leading the Hospitality Industry into the Tech-Enabled Future
Choice Hotels International is one of the largest lodging franchisors in the world, with more than 7400 hotels in 45 countries and territories across a diverse portfolio of 22 brands, ranging from upper upscale to midscale, extended stay, and economy segments. Choice operates at the intersection of Hospitality, Franchising, and Technology, offering a suite of cutting-edge cloud-based AI-infused solutions to help guests find the right room in the right location at the right value. The company has a strong history of technological innovation, including being one of the first hospitality organizations to complete the migration to the cloud. However, the Choice Hotels team knew that they needed to automate and uplevel their Disaster Recovery capabilities.
The Challenge
Disaster Recovery Is Different in the Cloud…
Along with the many resilience benefits of cloud-based workloads, the Choice Hotels team acknowledged the newfound need to prepare for cloud-specific outages, like regional AWS outages, in addition to downtime related to physical disasters. Stephen Cihak, Senior Director, Cloud Platform and Site Reliability at Choice shared, “We found out early in our cloud journey that running multi-region multi-master databases was overly expensive” due to the volume of data synchronizing between the regions and set systems up for cold backups.
He went on to share that after running in the cloud in a primarily single region, many multi-region capabilities suffered – for example, hard-coded region information, region-specific URLs, and the like, leaked into their code.
… and DIY DR for AWS is Not the Answer
However, the prospect of building DR themselves was not an option, primarily because of the implementation time. Retrofitting Choice’s current systems and platforms would be too complex & time-intensive to build in a reasonable time frame without outsized investment.
Even if the project had merited the extensive investment, the team predicted that their ability to recover would not be quick enough for the business’s needs if they went the DIY route. “If we needed to set everything up from scratch, we estimated about a week for all systems and it would have required 24×7 support to finish,” Stephen said. He also noted that due to triage prioritization, “some systems would have been online within a few days but with reduced functionality. This is a very high price for our associates and our customers, creating not just lost revenues but also reputational loss.”
The Solution
The “Easy Button” for Disaster Recovery
“Honestly, when we found Arpio, it was like, oh, this is almost an easy button... it picks everything up and moves it to another region.” — Jason Simpson.
The Choice team recognized the importance of a DR solution that could be trusted to just work in the event of an emergency, to restore everything needed to deliver and maintain the shopping and booking functionality that is so critical for their Franchisees.
The Arpio Impact: “I can go to sleep at night because I don’t have to worry.”
In working with Arpio, the Choice Hotels team was able to change their DR paradigm: they now have a fully tested, trusted DR solution if a true disaster were to occur.
Stephen shared, “We thought that was a two to three year effort total for everything in our environment. Now that we have this easy button, we’re actually gonna do more disaster recovery than we did in the past. Because before it was hard and it took a lot of people and it was challenging to rally that around the organization. We can do these on a much more regular cadence now. We can do mini events and it’s it’s literally just clicking a few buttons, no joke, to get that up and running.”
Aside from safeguarding the business continuity plan and simplifying the DR runbook, Stephen went on to share what was most important for their work with Arpio: “They have been amazing to work with as a as a real partner. They sat down with us, really worked on understanding where our problems are, what our needs are.”
In case the end result didn’t already speak for itself, Stephen concluded his thoughts with this invaluable outcome: “I can go to sleep at night because I don’t have to worry.”
