When George Limbert began as president of Red Roof, he met with franchise operators of the hotel brand to better understand what was going well — and what was not.
25.08.2023 - 13:36 / skift.com / Justin Dawes
Wyndham Hotels & Resorts is adopting the Opera Cloud property management system for another 2,000 of its hotels, part of a long-term effort to move all of its properties to the cloud.
The Opera Cloud system, made by Oracle Hospitality, is already in more than 800 Wyndham properties, primarily full-service hotels. Now, the hotel brand has decided to implement the system for another 2,000 — mostly in what it considers the the top of its mid-tier segment, namely brands like Ramada, La Quinta, and Wingate — by the end of 2024.
The tech is being added at the rate of about 20 hotels per week, according to Scott Strickland, chief information officer for Wyndham Hotels & Resorts.
The companies did not disclose the cost of the deal.
Wyndham has about 9,000 properties under its brand worldwide, and nearly all of them are franchisees. They include higher tier properties like Wyndham Grand, economy brands like Travelodge, and the mid-range brands.
The hotels historically had been using a number of systems, including the on-premises version of Opera, as well as Sihot and Protel, Strickland stated in an email.
But the company has decided that its hotels should use one of two cloud-based systems: Sabre’s SynXis Property Hub, typically being used for smaller hotels with less complicated needs, and Opera Cloud for larger hotels and those with amenities like restaurants and meeting facilities.
Having a fewer number of systems will allow the company to deliver innovations and tech support more quickly and easily, he said.
“By the end of the next year, our goal is to ensure all our hotels are in the cloud and using one of our two preferred PMS (property management system) offerings,” Strickland stated in an email.
“What’s most important is that each of these offerings are cloud-based, which means hotels have no need to manage and maintain on-site hardware or the technical and security headaches that have historically come with doing so.”
The company started piloting Opera Cloud and many other systems internationally in 2020 to find the best fit for the brand, he said. Wyndham started rolling out Opera Cloud to the full service hotels in mid-2021. The company was in the process of moving many of the other hotels to the Sabre system around the same time. Sabre fully transitioned all of its SynXis software systems to Google Cloud last year.
The move to a cloud-based property management system has been a trend as the hotel industry looks to modernize and increase efficiency.
Alex Alt, senior vice president and general manager for Oracle Hospitality, said during an interview in March that the company is focused on helping new and existing customers make the switch from older systems to the modern Opera Cloud system. At
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