For IHG Hotels and Resorts, the cloud provides just the right accommodation for business success. “First and foremost we see our journey to the cloud as the most extremely important part of both our technology and commercial strategies,” says George Turner, chief commercial and technology officer of the British multinational, which relies heavily on its sophisticated cloud infrastructure, chatbots, and AI to drive more digital business at its 19 hotel brands — more so at the edge.
More than 70% of IHG’s hotels — a portfolio that includes InterContinental, Kimpton Hotels, and Holiday Inn — are franchises, making parent company IHG in essence a technology product development company that bolsters the occupancy rates and revenues for the 6,100 hotels owned by franchisees.
Turner helps drive that success by wearing two hats for the company: He oversees a product-driven organization that must develop and deliver innovative services out to hotel owners and guests continuously even as his teams continue to build out IHG’s internal technology stack and services.
And it is the chain’s hefty multicloud architecture, anchored by Aviatrix’s cloud networking and Equinix’s interconnection technology, that enables Turner to bring the hotel empire much closer to its key customers — business and leisure guests, as well as hotel owners.
The cloud also helps IHG “drive commercial value for our enterprise,” Turner says, noting that IT pros can innovate in the cloud in months what used to take years. “Over a period of six months, we created an entirely new demand forecasting model, leveraging the capabilities in the cloud,” he says by way of example.
Moreover, IHG’s cloud backbone enables it to take advantage of emerging SaaS offerings, such as Speakeasy AI conversational chatbots, and deliver its own IHG Voice Cloud AI service to help guests and reception desk clerks at hundreds of hotels.
