Wyndham Is Tapping Oracle Hospitality for Tech at 2,000 More Hotels

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 that time, there were nearly 5,000 hotels using Opera Cloud and another 10,000 in the pipeline. He expects more than 40,000 hotels to be using it in the next three years. 

There are hundreds of thousands of hotels in the market that are potential customers for new cloud-based systems. Oracle Hospitality’s competitors are increasing their own share, as well. 

Hilton recently announced that it is contracting HotelKey to provide the property management system for all 7,000 of its hotels, a big switch from the in-house, on-premises system that the company has been using for 20 years. 

As experts have outlined, one of the main benefits of using a cloud-based system is that everything is handled remotely, including installation, updates, and tech support. And the open interface that the cloud systems offer means that hotels can easily integrate other third-party software products they may like, such as digital tipping or housekeeping. 

For Wyndham, Strickland said hotel owners have provided feedback that the Oracle system is more user friendly and requires much less training. Hilton hotel owners have said the same about HotelKey.

And the mobile technology that Opera Cloud provides allows workers to access the system off site if needed, Strickland said, or they could meet guests in a crowded lobby and check them in where they are.

“Little efficiencies like these — and there many — add up to make a big impact in the day-to-day operations of the hotel,” Strickland stated.