Exponential-e & Atlas Hotels

Delivering exceptional guest experiences through world-class connectivity and a seamless Cloud transformation

About Atlas Hotels

Delivering exceptional guest experiences through world-class connectivity and a seamless Cloud transformation

Atlas Hotels is the largest European franchise of Holiday Inn Express, operating 60 hotels across key business and leisure destinations in the UK, and one in Dresden, Germany. With over 20 years’ experience in the hospitality sector, Atlas Hotels manages a diverse portfolio of 7,555 hotel rooms, providing business and leisure travellers with unparalleled service and comfort.

The Challenge

Atlas’ guests expect the highest quality internet connectivity in their rooms, particularly business travellers who depend on access to critical online services. This placed considerable demands on the resilience of their network and the available bandwidth, with little consistency in the available speeds at different sites.

At the same time, as Atlas’ continued its expansion into new locations, seamless cross-site communication and collaboration between staff had become an essential part of its day-to-day operations. However, the Property Management System (PMS) still utilised on-site legacy servers, which increasingly limited the performance and availability of this critical platform, leading to multiple challenges around resource management and operational efficiency.

Atlas Hotels therefore sought to consolidate the disparate network solutions across its various sites under a single supplier. The aim was a unified, ‘always-on’ infrastructure that would provide seamless, secure, and highly available connectivity for both staff and guests, helping maintain the world-class service quality on which Atlas had built its reputation.

In addition to this foundational connectivity, the digital transformation initiative would also involve a full transition to a modern Cloud environment that would optimise the performance and availability of the PMS, while enhancing scalability and cost control as Atlas continued to expand its portfolio of sites and the range of services it offered its guests.

The Solution

Having a single supplier for a project of this scale is so important. The team at Exponential-e weren’t just on hand throughout each phase, ensuring we were able to hit our targets on time and to budget, but they have always been just a call away if we have any concerns. They have also offered invaluable input into ways we can further optimise our guest experience and broaden our range of services.

Ben Otton, IT Manager, Atlas Hotels

Once the project specifications had been defined and agreed upon, Exponential-e worked closely with Atlas Hotels’ IT teams at both the head office and various hotel locations across the UK, under the direction of a dedicated Exponential-e project manager, ensuring that their specific needs were met at every stage of the implementation.

The first phase of the project focused on the deployment of highly resilient, 1Gb connectivity across all 60 Atlas Hotels locations, leveraging Exponential-e’s own enterprise-class network to ensure consistent quality and availability for all guests and staff, with built-in redundancy to ensure 24/7 availability and minimal downtime. This resulted in double the available internet speeds at multiple sites, particularly those still reliant on legacy connectivity.

The second phase focused on migrating the legacy on-site infrastructure to a secure, highly available private Cloud, configured with end-to-end encryption and advanced firewall protection to guarantee the integrity of guests’ data. By moving virtualised servers and workloads into this new environment, the resulting improvements in performance, scalability, and the availability of critical systems – particularly the central PMS – allowed for more efficient resource management, freeing staff to focus on the guest experience.

The entire migration process was completed in six months, with minimal disruption to Atlas’ day-to-day operations. For additional levels of resilience, arobust disaster recovery plan was put in place, ensuring business continuity would always be maintained in the event of a system failure or data loss.

The partnership between Exponential-e and Atlas Hotels continues to evolve, with plans already in place to further enhance the guest experience through the application of new technologies. This includes implementing the next generation of interconnected meeting and event spaces at all 60 sites, incorporating advanced AV systems, platforms for simplified booking, and high-performance video conferencing.

With this successful transformation, Atlas Hotels now has a robust, high-performance, and secure digital foundation in place, which will support their ongoing growth and operational excellence. As more locations are added to the Atlas portfolio, Exponential-e will continue to expand and optimise the network infrastructure, ensuring all guests and staff continue to enjoy the highest quality connectivity and new opportunities for improvement can be identified and acted upon.

Solution Benefits

Highly resilient 1Gb connectivity available for staff and guests at all 60 Atlas sites across the UK and beyond, encompassing 7,555 hotel rooms
Improved communication and collaboration between dispersed staff, with optimal performance and availability for the central PMS
A seamless migration to a highly secure private Cloud environment, with in-built redundancy and robust disaster recovery systems minimising the risk of downtime
Effortless scalability and potential for future upgrades, supporting Atlas Hotels’ ongoing growth and the adoption of emerging technologies