Choice Hotels Wins Prestigious Technology Visionary Award

ROCKVILLE, Md. -- Building on its eight decades of innovation, Choice Hotels International, Inc. (NYSE: CHH) was named a Hotel Visionary Award winner by Hospitality Technology in the Enterprise Innovator category for the creation of choiceEDGE, a proprietary, cloud-based global reservation system (GRS) and distribution platform. The award, which honors hotels that deliver enterprise solutions, was presented to Choice yesterday at HT-NEXT 2019 in New Orleans. HT-NEXT is produced by Hospitality Technology and Hospitality Technology Next Generation.

Introduced in 2018 as the industry's first new GRS in over 30 years, choiceEDGE supports 7,000 Choice hotels worldwide, connecting more than 200 million people to Choice Hotels' 570,000 hotel rooms, and handling more than $9 billion in transactions annually.

choiceEDGE features:

• Faster-to-market new products, features, and third-party connectivity. Cloud-based scalability, stability, and performance delivered through a "reservation-as-a-service" model.
• Preconfigured, state-of-the-art connectivity with online travel agents, global distribution systems, and property management systems, enabling rapid onboarding of hotels and instant value delivery.
• Capability to add selling disparate inventory types in the future, including hotel rooms, meeting rooms, vacation rentals, and package offerings - or any space for any duration.

"choiceEDGE was the largest, most ambitious technology project in our company's history," said Brian Kirkland, chief technology officer, Choice Hotels. "Many travel companies have tried and failed to create their own systems, and choiceEDGE's successful rollout underscores our commitment to developing new technology in-house to meet guests' needs and help our franchisees succeed. We changed the paradigm and now have the industry's most advanced GRS and distribution platform - all with zero downtime for guests, hotel owners and partners during the transition, which is the ultimate measure of success."

Choice has been an industry leader in innovation over the course of its 80-year history. It was the first hotel company to offer online booking, roll out a global iPhone application, and launch a soft brand in the Ascend Hotel Collection. More recently, Choice introduced Virtual Pay and the Group Management Platform — both tools to help hotels capture corporate and group business. The company also pursues strategic relationships with best-in-class technology companies. It is in the process of migrating over 1,000 applications to Amazon Web Services, which will enhance its systems' performance, scalability, and reliability. Choice also became the first hotel company to work with Google to launch voice-enabled booking, in addition to enabling Book on Google, a tool that allows travelers to seamlessly search, select, and reserve hotel rooms at any of Choice's 12 hotel brands.

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