Travelodge is driving an ambitious expansion programme in the UK that will see the budget hotel chain open 700 new UK hotels by 2020. To support this growth, Travelodge needed a scalable and reliable solution to better manage its business-critical applications and help handle the increasing number of customer reservations made online. With approximately 85% of bookings made over its website – an increase from 17% in 2003 – www.travelodge.co.uk is the most popular initial point of contact for customers.

With such growth, the reliability of 24/7 uptime for Travelodge’s website is highly important. A stable, reliable and fast-performing website was essential to ensure customer satisfaction at all times and to maximise revenue potential for Travelodge. Travelodge’s previous website ran on a community-supported distribution of Linux with an IT infrastructure supported by the in-house IT department. Whilst Travelodge was satisfied with the reliability and value of the Linux platform, it needed a solution that was fully supported and looked to the main commercial Linux vendors for its operating system solution.

Travelodge demanded a solution that not only included high maintenance and top-level service, but a partner that could reliably host the company’s infrastructure, whilst also providing first class service and the appropriate scalability to match Travelodge’s plans for growth.

Travelodge began searching for a hosting service provider for its consumer website, having selected Red Hat for its Linux solution. Attenda, a managed service provider, seemed the ideal fit given their ability to take on responsibility for pro-actively managing the infrastructure of its network of systems. Attenda had the capability to support both proprietary and open source operating systems, and had worked with Red Hat solutions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network. Travelodge took the strategic decision to entrust Attenda with the management of their website production environment and a disaster recovery solution, running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Travelodge chose the Red Hat Enterprise Linux solution based primarily on the peace of mind that comes with the Red Hat support contract. With such a large proportion of Travelodge reservations made through the website, the company cannot afford downtime. The solution was implemented on 16 HP mid range servers, with an HP MSA 1000 SAN, assorted communications and backup and security devices.

Under an initial three year contract, Attenda is managing the production website environment and a disaster recovery solution. The contract has since been enhanced to also manage the infrastructure for the company’s Refund System.

“As our website is the first port of call for potential and existing customers, we needed to identify the best solution and support possible,” commented Alex Thomson, IT Director at Travelodge. Thomson continued, “We need reliable support and felt the 24/7 site support service of the Linux community could be improved upon. Attenda ticked all of the boxes and we have been delighted with the service to date.”

Attenda’s service has enabled Travelodge to obtain 24/7 availability and support for its website. Attenda ensures maximum reliability for Travelodge’s website infrastructure and high availability of the business critical web applications, through the delivery of its web applications and infrastructure managed services to an agreed business–led SLA.

Attenda uses a Red Hat Network to manage its Red Hat Enterprise servers, ensuring that Travelodge is kept up to date with the latest security patches and management tools.

The Attenda solution has consolidated Travelodge’s complex web server configurations and simultaneously allows full scalability and easy management of its IT infrastructure.

Since migrating to the Attenda hosted solution, Travelodge is able to drive increased additional business through its revenue-generating website, experiencing reduced ‘behind-the-scenes’ costs for its web presence. It has also considerably lowered its long term IT expenditure while improving its online customer experience. The choice of Red Hat Enterprise Linux has provided increased value through enhanced manageability of the IT infrastructure, open source scalability and improved security, safeguarding operation. The solution has enabled Travelodge to significantly reduce the cost of running its servers, whilst maintaining extremely high service availability.

“We are confident that the Attenda managed service solution has offered us the very best possible support for our business-critical applications” concluded Thomson.