Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts has decided to centralise its IT infrastructure to better align its processes and systems in support of its customers, with a particular focus on its website and guest reservations system.
Due to the flexible nature of the hospitality industry, the company decided to look to a cloud-based solution, which would enable it to leverage additional capacity on demand during peak booking periods.
The challenge was to identify an organisation that could offer the service on a global basis to support Shangri-La’s global expansion plans, and one that could also achieve a tight, eight-week migration window, necessary to fit in with business demands.
Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts VP digital marketing, Michael Leong said: "Our website is our window on the world, and our reservations system a critical customer touch point. We handle hundreds of thousands of page views and guest bookings on a daily basis, coming both direct and through the travel trade. So it was of paramount importance that our service migration was seamless, without any interruption to service availability."
Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts chose Verizon due to its proven ability to deliver a highly scalable, secure and efficient cloud environment, and the company’s global reach and expertise. Verizon was also a known quantity to Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts, as it already provided global network infrastructure services and support.
Verizon’s professional services team collaborated closely with the internal IT team throughout an intensive migration planning and delivery process to safeguard against business disruptions by ensuring that critical systems such as reservations and back-office applications would be available and fully operational throughout the transition. This comprehensive planning and review process was critical to the project’s success.
Verizon’s regional vice president of strategic cloud and security, David Kim, said: "The cloud is still an unproven area for many businesses, but increasingly, forward-thinking organizations like Shangri-La are realising the benefits it can bring to their business infrastructure."
The Hong Kong-based company has more than 80 hotels, and more than 34,000 rooms, which it either owns or manages, under the Shangri-La brand. The company is expanding rapidly, with upcoming projects in mainland China, India, Mongolia, the Philippines, Qatar, Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom.
