Microsoft Server Product PortfolioCustomer Solution Case Study

Global Hotel Company Delivers Reservations in Milliseconds with Highly Reliable System

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Hospitality—Hotel and motel

Customer ProfileChoice Hotels International, based in Silver Spring, Maryland, represents hundreds of franchise hotels around the world. Its brands include EconoLodge, Rodeway Inn, and Comfort Inn. The company has 1,600 employees.

Business SituationChoice Hotels had different reservation systems—one that was centrally located, and the other maintained by individual hotels—that made it hard to process reservations and reservation changes.

SolutionThe company created a new reservation solution based on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server Service Broker to quickly and efficiently coordinate reservation information between individual hotels and the company’s central booking system.

Benefits Highly responsive Scalable and reliable Quick to develop, easy to manage

“The Microsoft platform provides a very high level of speed and reliability for the messaging traffic in our new reservation solution. This helps us maintain a high level of service for our customers.”

Todd Reeser, Manager of Reservations Delivery, Choice Hotels International

Choice Hotels International franchises some of the most widely recognized hotel brands in the world, including Sleep Inn, Rodeway Inn, and Comfort Inn. The company, which gets hundreds of thousands of reservation requests a day, was exploring different options to integrate data from central and local systems used to book rooms. To integrate the central and dispersed data sources, Choice Hotels created a solution using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise and SQL Server Service Broker, a component of the database software that handles message traffic between different systems. The company was able to develop the solution faster than if it had used Java technology. The new solution is highly reliable and easy to manage, and it delivers reservation information in milliseconds.

SituationChoice Hotels International is one of the world’s largest lodging companies, with franchise brand names that include Comfort Inn, Sleep Inn, EconoLodge, and Rodeway Inn. While its largest presence is in the United States, the company operates in 35 countries and territories, franchising approximately 6,000 hotels that represent more than 485,000 rooms.

Choice Hotels manages reservations for its franchisees, a process that during peak periods can involve tens of thousands of transactions per second. Historically, Choice Hotels has operated two different reservation systems. One is the Central Reservation System (CRS), which handles reservations that customers make on the web and through hotel call centers and third-party sources such as travel agencies and online travel services. The CRS accounts for about 33 percent of all reservations for company franchises. The remainder is handled by property management systems running on client/server computer networks located at each hotel property.

Transactions that are delayed, lost, or otherwise mishandled can result in lost revenue and disgruntled customers. To avoid this, the Choice Hotels IT department operates under strict service level agreements (SLAs) that guarantee speed and availability for reservations. However, the different reservation systems created problems for Choice Hotels because of the poor visibility into activity at the franchise locations, making it hard to offer seamless service to customers.

“We faced a number of challenges because we did not have access to reservations that were booked locally using separate software run by the individual hotels,” says Todd Reeser, Manager of Reservations Delivery for Choice Hotels International. “For example, we have a call-forwarding service that sends guests to our central booking service when they call to make a reservation at a specific hotel if someone at the hotel is unavailable to take their call. Guests would think that they are speaking with someone at the local property, but our centrally located agents would not be able to see, for example, if the hotel is completely booked. Also, our centrally located agents could not view the most recent version of a reservation if any changes were made just minutes before at the hotel.”

Choice Hotels managers felt that they had to find a new solution that could combine seamless integration between the central reservation system and the disparate systems running at the franchise properties. At the same time, the solution had to provide the type of mission-critical performance, scalability, and availability required to meet the SLAs that Choice Hotels maintains with its franchises so they can provide the best possible customer service.

SolutionChoice Hotels decided to develop a mission-critical solution that includes two systems, both of which run on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise data management software and the Windows Server 2008 Enterprise operating system. The solution, deployed in early 2010 and developed in less than six weeks, includes

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the Reservation Management Service (RMS), which stores and services reservations and reservation changes. The RMS is designed with a service-oriented architecture that retrieves and makes copies of all reservations made at the thousands of locations using the existing CRS. The relational database management system (RDBMS) for the CRS will eventually be migrated from an IBM Informix system running on the Solaris operating system to the RMS, hosted on a system running SQL Server 2008.

The second system is choiceADVANTAGE, a full-service property management system that helps franchisees manage reservations provided through the Choice Hotels Global

distribution platform. The system, which Choice Hotels began deploying in mid-2010 to more than 3,500 properties, also helps with daily operational tasks such as accounting and housekeeping logistics, and helps synchronize room rates and inventory listings with the CRS.

Choice Hotels considered using Java Message Service (JMS) for the solution but decided instead to deploy Microsoft SQL Server Service Broker for the speed and overall reliability that the technology would bring to the solution. The core components of the RMS application include:

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise, which hosts about 250 gigabytes of information.

Microsoft SQL Server Service Broker, which provides the SQL Server Database Engine with native support for messaging and queuing applications. SQL Server Service Broker handles all of the details of message distribution across the Choice Hotels network without requiring the company’s IT department to program complex communication and messaging procedures.

Oracle WebLogic, a platform that includes a Java EE application server that provides a platform for web services.

The RMS consists of a load balancer, two Apache web servers, one WebLogic cluster with two nodes, and one SQL Server database cluster. The choiceADVANTAGE system has a similar architecture but with a WebLogic cluster that has four nodes.When a reservation is created or modified in CA, Java code in the CA WebLogic

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inserts a message into the SQL Server Service Broker queue, establishing a route between the CA and RMS systems. The reservation is delivered to RMS within a few milliseconds. Once the reservation has been committed, a delivery confirmation is stored in CA for audit purposes. The WebLogic layer, which provides the business logic for the transaction, uses the Microsoft SQL Server JDBC Driver to communicate with the database server. The message is inserted into the SQL Server Service Broker queue after all business rule validation is done in WebLogic. BenefitsBy creating its new solution on the Microsoft mission-critical platform, Choice Hotels was able to address important technical issues in order to provide better, faster service. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server Service Broker provide a responsive service for customers making reservations. The solution is highly scalable and reliable. And by using the Microsoft platform, Choice Hotels developed an easy-to-manage solution in a fraction of the time that a similar solution would have required using Java technology. “The Microsoft platform provides a very high level of speed and reliability for the messaging traffic in our new reservation solution,” says Reeser. “This helps us maintain a high level of service for our customers and thousands of franchisees.”

Highly Responsive Narasimhan Sampath, Database Engineer for the Data Management Group at Choice Hotels International, says the reservation solution delivers is extremely responsive. “By running our new reservation solution on the Microsoft platform, online reservations are typically delivered in

milliseconds, which is what customers come to expect when they go on the web,” says Sampath. “Our goal is to ensure that a ‘round-trip request’—that is, from the moment a customer queries the system until the time they get a response—is 500 milliseconds or less. Most of the time we do much better than that—reservations are typically delivered within a few milliseconds after being created.”

Before the new solution was deployed, central booking agents could not see what was going on at a local hotel, and, consequently customers experienced frustrating delays. Now, Sampath says, “Our guests can book a room by calling the central system or by calling the hotel, and then make subsequent changes by calling either place.”. “Each system is automatically made aware of the change. This was not possible prior to using SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server Service Broker. With the Microsoft platform, we’re able to provide a fast, seamless reservation experience for our customers.”

Scalable and ReliableThe new solution is highly scalable and reliable—critical benefits that help franchisees deliver excellent customer service. “SQL Server 2008 scales very well,” says Sampath. “We have increased the number of hotel properties using the solution by about 40 percent since we implemented SQL Server Service Broker, and we have not seen any degradation in performance using the same hardware infrastructure.”

During peak periods—for example, around holidays and summer travel times—it is especially important for the solution to

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"SQL Server Service Broker is extremely reliable—more than the Java technology that we initially considered. We have consistently maintained our SLAs with uptime of 99.8 percent or better."

Narasimhan Sampath, Database Engineer, Data Management Group,

Choice Hotels International

scale quickly to accommodate spikes in traffic while remaining highly reliable. “One of our source systems that feeds into the RMS averages about 27,000 transactions per second,” Sampath says. “During peak periods, however, because of the new Microsoft platform, the RMS system can easily handle as many as 57,000 transactions per second. Plus, SQL Server Service Broker is extremely reliable—more than the Java technology that we initially considered. We have consistently maintained our SLAs with uptime of 99.8 percent or better. The system is always up except in instances of planned downtime for releases, patches, and upgrades.” Quick to Develop, Easy to ManageThe Microsoft products also helped Choice Hotels create an effective solution quickly, says Steve Garvey, Senior Programmer Analyst for Choice Hotels International. “It would have taken us six to eight weeks or longer to create the application using Java technology,” says Garvey. “With SQL Server Service Broker, we had the core components up and running in fewer than two weeks.”

He also notes that following deployment, the solution has been easy to manage. “SQL Server Service Broker works within the same familiar environment as other SQL Server tools, making it easy for our IT staff to manage,” he says. “From an administrator’s perspective, I have never had to go in and fix anything with Service Broker. It just works.”

Microsoft Server Product PortfolioFor more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:www.microsoft.com/servers

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about Choice Hotels International products and services, call (301) 592-5000 or visit the website at:www.choicehotels.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published January 2011

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Windows Server 2008 Enterprise− Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise

Technologies− Microsoft SQL Server Service Broker