Thon Hotels pioneers “big bang” adoption of Oracle OPERA Cloud PMS

On April 8, 2024, guests at almost 100 Thon Hotels’ properties across Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands noticed something special going on. Balloons filled lobbies. Staff at some properties were passing out cookies or cake in the shape of clouds; others were pouring champagne for toasts.

They were celebrating the culmination of a trailblazing cloud migration project that may prove to be a model for the hospitality industry.

Oracle was so impressed with what Thon calls its “big bang” rollout of Oracle OPERA Cloud Property Management applications—across 96 properties in a whirlwind 31-hour stretch—that Oracle now recommends a similar migration strategy to its other hotel customers.

“Never before had another hotel chain taken an approach like Thon, and done it so seamlessly, all in one night across so many properties,” says Eva Lund, senior director of program management for Oracle Hospitality.

The customer-led project created a playbook for how hotels “can accelerate their transition to the cloud instead of dragging it out over many months,” Lund says.

Before the big bang

When Thon decided to move its PMS out of its data center, Oracle Consulting recommended it take the standard phased approach for transitioning from the on-premises Oracle OPERA 5 set of applications to OPERA Cloud. But Thon thought an all-at-once migration would better serve its needs.

The Oslo, Norway–based hotelier wanted to avoid a protracted property-by-property, issue-by-issue rollout. It didn’t want to simultaneously run two master databases that managed rates, room availability, and the brand’s loyalty program, or have different properties operating on parallel systems.

“We were considering that while [the big bang approach] was higher risk, if we were able to pull it off we could hit the ground running after go-live with all the hotels,” says Benjamin Hallerud of Hallerud Consulting, who assisted Thon on the project. “We’d all be in the same boat. One property’s question would be relevant to all of them.”

Having sold Oracle on the rapidly synchronized application migration, Thon recognized that a prerequisite would be intensive preparation and a commitment to ongoing communications across properties, says Kari Mette Nyhaug, Thon’s head of ICT applications.

“We centralized and standardized a lot,” Nyhaug says. “Without a lot of standardization up front, I think this would have been a lot harder.”

About half a year before the big bang, Thon formed a project group that planned every element of the changeover. Nothing was left to chance.

The first step was building excitement among the staff who would be using the new system. Employees visiting a stand at Thon’s company fair in January 2024 could test-drive Oracle OPERA Cloud. The company made internal videos highlighting the functionality specific to its hotels, and it used the Oracle Learning platform to train staff in advance of implementation.

As the big bang approached, the project team continuously apprised staff of which PMS features would be changing—and what was expected of them to help ensure a successful cloud migration.

It wasn’t hard to earn buy-in. “We had been waiting for the cloud for several years,” says Anja Syversen-Hjellestad, regional director for Thon Hotels. “After COVID, employees were very eager to get their hands on the new system.”

Training was completed three weeks before the big bang. In the final week before Thon’s data center would close and the cloud-based PMS would go live, all the hotels practiced recording their operations, such as check-ins and housekeeping, on an Excel spreadsheet for the hours, and potentially days, of downtime. The project group held Q&A sessions and developed task sheets, checklists, and routines for every property, with superusers assigned to all of them to manage a smooth transition.

The big day

Project leaders at command centers in Oslo and Brussels supervised the migration as it reverberated across Northern Europe. The big bang started with five properties switching over to Oracle OPERA Cloud and then carefully testing critical functionality, such as interfaces and credit card transactions. After that, both owned and franchised hotels lined up in designated groups of 10, with one taking its turn to go live on the new PMS about every five minutes. While these properties were geographically dispersed, they all felt they were in it together, Nyhaug says.

As part of the communications plan, hotels in Norway, Sweden, Belgium, and the Netherlands—those waiting in the queue, those actively preparing to go live, and those celebrating completion—shared their progress with each other throughout the day. They posted photos and videos across internal channels showing staff first using the new system and then celebrating with guests.

After the big bang

Thon Hotels closed out about 2,000 end users from Oracle OPERA 5 on the morning of April 8. The next day, employees logged in and started operating on Oracle OPERA Cloud.

“The biggest change is that the pace is a lot faster now with OPERA Cloud,” Nyhaug says. “We have more upgrades, and we get to deploy new functionality quicker, which is what we wanted.”

Thon is also starting to take advantage of Oracle Hospitality Integration Platform, a collection of open APIs unique to OPERA Cloud that lets hotels seamlessly integrate other Oracle and third-party applications.

Typically, Oracle recommends to its customers how to implement its latest cloud applications. But in the case of Thon’s migration, it’s jointly developing a methodology with one customer and sharing that knowledge with others.

“It was Thon who insisted on this big bang. We had never done it before,” says Oracle’s Lund, adding that the large number of Thon hotels was the main reason Oracle didn’t even present the option of migrating them all at once at its first meeting.

“Now, this is the standard delivery option for us,” she says. “It’s the first thing we present to our customer. And if not, we ask why.”

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