
Best Western International operates over 4,000 hotels with over 2,000 of those hotels being located in the United States. Within the hospitality industry, Best Western is known as the world’s largest hotel family.
Over the past few years, Best Western has looked for ways to use cloud in order to streamline their central reservation system. After a lengthy testing period, Best Western has announced that they have adopted Protel Air as their cloud platform.
Protel is a German company that specializes in building hotel software. Best Western required a two-way interface that interacts with their central reservation system (CRS) in real time. At any time, hotel management can go into the cloud and get the most up to date information concerning vacancies, cancelations and more.
Best Western says that Protel Air went through an exhaustive certification process. Before deciding to green light the new Protel cloud platform, Best Western had to ensure that their strict internal specifications were met. Since Best Western operates a mix of corporately owned hotels as well as franchise owned brands, Protel’s SaaS offerings had to be agile, dependable and resilient.
“We are especially proud of being one of a select few software manufacturers who can now offer a true cloud solution to the BEST WESTERN Family. The recent ITB has once again shown us how strong the hotel industry’s demand for cloud-based products is. The BEST WESTERN Two-Way interface and a cloud-based system are available now, and protel is one of the few providers worldwide who can fulfill both,” says Manfred Osthues, founding partner of Protel.
By using cloud, Best Western streamlines many of the legacy backend systems that have been in production. Since Protel Air is based on the cloud, hotels will no longer need to endure system downtime for maintenance or software updates. Protel also handles data backup and cloud security for Best Western. Protel uses an ISO certified datacenter to securely house the data belonging to Best Western.