Case Study: Red Lion Hotels achieves 38% cost savings and scalable, PCI-compliant hosting with Amazon Web Services

Red Lion Hotels - Customer Case Study

Red Lion Hotels Corporation, a Spokane-based hospitality company with 48 properties and the TicketsWest ticketing service, was building hyper-local web and mobile platforms so each hotel could present area-specific storefronts. With a lean IT team and an existing Umbraco/Windows/SQL build, the company was unhappy with the cost and scalability of its co-location hosting and sought a solution that would reduce operational burden and handle seasonal traffic spikes.

After engaging cloud specialist 2nd Watch, Red Lion moved to Amazon Web Services, deploying EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, S3, VPC and CloudFront. The switch is expected to cut hosting costs by about 38%, improve monitoring and PCI validation, provide elastic scaling for holiday peaks, speed site performance to boost conversions, and create scalable testing environments — allowing IT to focus on strategic initiatives while migrating TicketsWest and other systems to AWS.

Red Lion Hotels

David Barbieri

CIO and SVP, Red Lion