Oracle Hospitality Wants to Bring More Hotels Into the Cloud

25.08.2023 - 13:55 / skift.com / Justin Dawes

The hotel industry finally wants to modernize the tech systems it uses to operate. And Oracle Hospitality — which has sold much of the older tech that’s still being used today — is focused on making that shift happen. 

Nearly 5,000 properties are now using the four-year-old Oracle Opera Cloud property management system, and there are about 10,000 more in the pipeline, said Alex Alt, senior vice president and general manager for Oracle Hospitality. The pipeline includes Oracle customers that want to upgrade, as well as hotels running other legacy systems or competing modern systems. Alt expects that number to exceed 40,000 in the next three years. 

More than 40,000 properties use some version of the Oracle property management system product. The majority are still using old or on-premises Oracle systems, but the company is working to help those clients upgrade to the modern cloud-based system. 

The number of Opera Cloud customers has doubled each year since it was released. 

“That acceleration has exceeded our expectations,” said Laura Calin, vice president of strategy and solutions management for Oracle. 

Cloud applications are not new, but the hospitality industry is still relatively early in adopting this technology. Shifts in investment prompted by the pandemic have led more hotels to upgrade their systems, which is why there is so much business potential. 

Using a modern cloud platform gives hotels access to consistently updated technology that’s cheaper and easier to navigate and troubleshoot. Besides making internal operations more efficient, having access to new software products can give guests the kinds of high-tech experiences many of them prefer. 

“There’s certainly a move afoot in the industry for brands to retire in-house proprietary tech across most of the tech stack, not just not just property management,” Alt said. “We’re absolutely winning that business, and then we’re winning from competitors that haven’t been able to invest.”

The company will have announcements in the coming months of thousands more properties that are adding Oracle’s cloud suite, he said.

Growing Opera Cloud is the biggest focus right now, and that includes investments that can help make that happen, such as in-app training for users and tools to migrate data from old systems into the new. As the community of users grows, Oracle is looking at investing in customer support.

Oracle is also looking at artificial intelligence and machine learning in a few areas, including personalized upsells to guests, integrating with brands’ systems for access to guest loyalty programs, and automating repeated tasks such as room assignment.

“Shaving minutes, or even seconds, off of repeatable tasks at a hotel, whether it’s checking