Citrix Empowers InTown Suites to Securely Manage Apps and Data from the Cloud

        In the highly competitive hospitality industry, keeping room rates affordable and operating costs contained while delivering an excellent customer experience is essential to being competitive. InTown Suites, one of the largest economy, extended-stay hotel chains in the U.S. with 25,000 rooms in 189 locations across 22 states, has delivered on this challenge by adopting Citrix Cloud, a cloud-based workspace services management platform. Citrix is assisting customers such as InTown Suites on their path to the cloud by providing a smooth approach to adopting cloud services at their pace. With Citrix Cloud, InTown Suites can easily deploy and manage secure app and data delivery workloads on their choice of IT infrastructure, from on-premises datacenters and private clouds to public clouds. The result is an efficient and secure means of operating the business, while providing a compelling guest experience.

            The use of Citrix Cloud as the new platform for the company’s property management system, NiteVision, brought an impactful change to InTown Suite’s IT management. NiteVision, is the application used to automate the operations of the hotel and is the hub of a property’s operations processing reservations, room availability and rates. By virtualizing NiteVision with the Citrix Cloud XenApp and XenDesktop Service, the IT team increased operational efficiencies across the hotel chain. Through managing all aspects of the guest check-in process on a single console, front desk staff can now integrate a finger print scanner, credit card machine, and ID scanner for guest driver’s licenses to simplify the process, and ultimately provide a better first impression to guests.  And behind the scenes, IT was able to reduce the on-property hardware footprint while managing all of their virtual applications from a single cloud-based console.

            By adopting the holistic approach that securely delivers and manages all apps, data, devices and networks from a single integrated platform, Citrix has made it possible to seamlessly move workloads into the cloud, enabling the corporate office to support the rapid growth of InTown Suites as it expands through new construction and acquisitions. For a company that runs on controlling costs and employs a small IT staff, using the cloud has reduced costs while driving operational efficiency. A simple proof point is that an increase in staff is not required even as the company expands. During its 2016 process to renovate all properties, InTown Suites began the switch to the cloud by consolidating 190 servers located in individual hotels into one corporate datacenter, so that each hotel only now needs one desktop at the front desk and one thin client in the back office. And having added over 50 locations over the past two years, a number they hope to double as they continue to build and acquire into 2019, Citrix Cloud gives InTown Suites the flexibility to grow quickly. For a company that wants to be the perfect choice for anyone on a budget, adopting the cloud is fueling progress by delivering on that brand promise every day.