Hotel chain boosts online operations

Starwood Hotels replaces legacy systems

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide is replacing legacy reservation systems with applications running on Linux servers to improve its online operations.

The company, which owns chains including Le Meridien, W Hotels, Sheraton and Four Points, has also deployed Progress ObjectStore Enterprise software to improve its response to online pricing and availability enquiries.

Israel del Rio, senior vice president of technology solutions and architecture at Starwood, says the company’s mainframe was installed more than 15 years ago .

‘It was still doing its job, but would not have been suitable given the scale of internet enquiries, which have almost doubled every year in recent years,’ he said.

‘If we had not introduced this system, we would have been forced to increase the mainframe capacity and performance would have been affected.’

The speed of information retrieval makes it possible for pricing and individual room availability to be offered as part of the reservation service. Prices can also be adjusted in real time according to supply and demand, to improve occupancy and yield rates.

ObjectStore Enterprise is embedded in the distributed applications that communicate with the international Central Reservation System, based on a central Oracle relational database.

Persistently required data used for answering queries is stored in the ObjectStore cache and processed many times faster than the time taken to query a disk-based relational database record.

Starwood was experiencing a throughput of hundreds of transactions a minute; it is now achieving a rate of hundreds of transactions per second.

Del Rio says the system is more flexible, is reducing operational costs, and can grow as quickly as business needs require.

‘Our return on investment is mainly cost avoidance, by taking transactions away from the mainframe,’ he said.

There is also potential for new capabilities, such as offering alternative dates automatically to customers.

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