Meliá Hotels Saves 60% in Costs and Cuts Response Time by Migrating Its Mainframe to AWS

With a focus on leisure and business experiences, Meliá operates more than 380 hotels across four continents. The hotel company’s CRS application manages and exposes room inventory, serves availability requests, facilitates bookings, manages loyalty programs, and contracts with tour operators. Previously, its CRS application ran on a giant mainframe computer consuming 3.742 million instructions per second. Any updates or changes affected the entire mainframe, and regular maintenance resulted in 4 hours of downtime every other week. Meliá also faced increasingly prohibitive costs per transaction in a market where competitors had begun to incorporate digital solutions at significantly lower costs. Although Meliá was agile in other parts of the company, it was struggling to develop new products quickly for its sales and operations personnel. It also had trouble attracting new IT talent, which didn’t want to work on its legacy technologies.

Meliá set an ambitious goal to decommission its mainframe entirely in 2 years, despite estimates that a project of this size would take 4 years. To plan its migration strategy, the company worked alongside AWS Enterprise Support, which provides concierge-like service where the main focus is helping companies achieve their outcomes and find success in the cloud. With the benefit of 24-7 technical support, the teams sought to migrate Meliá’s CRS to the cloud using the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP), a comprehensive and proven cloud migration program based upon the experience of AWS in migrating thousands of enterprise customers to the cloud. As a first step, Meliá completed the AWS Migration Readiness Assessment (AWS MRA), which consists of a series of questions against the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework to help assess an organization’s readiness for large-scale migration and digital transformation. The Meliá team also relied on the expertise of AWS Professional Services—a global team of experts that helps organizations realize their desired business outcomes when using AWS—to build the landing zone for the migration and plan for the subsequent migration waves. In addition to these engagements, the Meliá employees deepened their cloud skills through about 1000 hours of AWS Training and Certification courses.

To start the migration project, Meliá split its monolithic architecture into smaller applications that would evolve on different independent paths. To ease the transfer of its data, Meliá used AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), which helps companies migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely. With 6 TB of storage for core functions, the company’s source database remained fully operational as it adopted Amazon Aurora, which is designed for unparalleled high performance and availability at a global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. “We were able to complete the project in 2 years instead of 4,” says Chris Palomino, Meliá’s vice president for global IT. “The commitment of the AWS team has been incredible. The company’s customer obsession is tangible in our business relationship with them.”

Meliá also worked to align its compute costs with consumer demand. Its CRS applications run on Kubernetes clusters using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed container service to run and scale Kubernetes applications in the cloud or on premises. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Meliá decided to give back by providing 2,000 hotel rooms every day for healthcare personnel at no cost. On the optimized CRS architecture, Meliá set a company record by handling 2,000 room requests in 1 minute and 8 seconds without issue. For cost optimization, clusters run using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances, which let companies take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the cloud and are available at steep discounts over Amazon EC2 On-Demand Pricing. “We’ve reduced our compute costs by 60 percent after migrating to AWS, and that’s seven figures of savings,” Palomino says. “We have much better technology at a lesser cost.”

The hotel’s newfound scalability also means that it can run large promotional campaigns. Rather than segment potential customers into smaller groups to minimize the impact on its CRS, the company can simply scale up to handle an influx in demand without increasing its response times. For example, the daily number of hotel availability requests increased from 26 million in April 2019 to 50 million during spring 2022 while the average CRS response time decreased from 234 ms to 160 ms. These faster response times have improved the customer experience for online booking and helped Meliá rank higher on online travel agencies and travel search engines, which sell directly to customers and account for about half of Meliá’s business. Moreover, the company no longer experiences disruptions to its online sales because it can maintain consistent, near 99.99 percent availability on its CRS application. “If we experience any downtime, our CRS application recovers so fast that we don’t even notice it,” says Palomino.

By working on AWS, Meliá can connect its CRS with other pieces of its microservices architecture, which has helped it attract new engineering talent and spark innovation. For example, Meliá automated the process of matching sales to invoices, removing a previously tedious manual task for employees. Customers have benefited from the company’s innovative solutions as well. Since using AWS, Meliá deployed a feature that gives its customers the ability to add amenities to a hotel room as they reserve it. Meliá has also cut its time to market for new projects by 75 percent. “Developing new features took us 4 months to do before,” says Palomino. “Now, it takes us 1 month to complete new projects.”

Now that the modernization of its mainframe is complete, Meliá plans to migrate its enterprise resource planning systems to the cloud. Plus, Meliá built its new website completely using microservices and connected it to other parts of the company running on AWS. “The new website is much faster and more relevant,” Palomino says. “Using AWS, we have increased our business agility and improved the whole customer experience.”