On AWS, Meliá Saves 58% and Builds Organizational Resilience During Unexpected Downturn

The hospitality industry was hit especially hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, as social distancing, travel restrictions, and economic hardships forced the cancellation or alteration of millions of travel plans around the world. Meliá found AWS to be an invaluable resource in responding and effectively adapting to those challenges. With its already nimble cloud-based IT architecture, Meliá was more prepared than most when the COVID-19 pandemic caused a 95 percent decrease in reservations virtually overnight. “The way the AWS infrastructure is built, you pay per use, and you pay for computing power,” says Palomino. “The less you use, the less you pay.” If Meliá had retained its on-premises architecture, it would have had to pay for servers regardless of the drop in reservations. Meliá, which was already saving 40 percent yearly by switching to the cloud before the crisis, saved an additional 58 percent by scaling down during the erratic period of dry spells.

Meliá tested the elasticity of its cloud architecture again when the company offered 20,000 free room nights to medical professionals as thanks for their service during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company released 2,000 rooms for booking every day at 9:00 a.m. over a 10-day period, and the rooms sold out in minutes each day. After weeks of relatively low activity, Meliá was able to efficiently scale its infrastructure up again to accommodate these spikes. “On AWS, you can be ready to absorb all that workload without dropping your performance,” says Palomino, “and then you can reduce your costs the rest of the day, when you have no activity.” The extreme swings in demand during this time underscored the value of the AWS pay-for-use model that had motivated Meliá to move to the cloud in the first place: creating cost savings for the company while setting it up to scale as needed in any situation.

Meliá’s cloud infrastructure helped prepare it for the reservation fluctuation brought on by the global health crisis, but there were other areas where the company needed to adapt in real time. When a stay-at-home order left Meliá’s 500 call center agents without a place to work, the company turned to Amazon WorkSpaces—a managed, secure desktop-as-a-service solution—to effectively set up 500 home offices in just 10 days.

“Our technical staff said it was easy to understand how everything worked in AWS,” says Palomino. The team quickly adapted Meliá’s security architecture to a new cloud-based platform, testing call center applications and ensuring they met payment card industry compliance. When they were finished, the technical staff gave its 500 users access to the Amazon WorkSpaces platform, enabling the call center staff to answer the sudden influx of customer questions from the comfort and safety of their own homes in a secure and efficient manner.