Apaleo sets 'record' with the rollout of 7,500 citizenM rooms in 8 weeks

Apaleo has set a new benchmark for tech adoption after moving all 7,500 rooms at operator citizenM's US and European operations to its property management platform in under two months.

The Dutch-based hotel brand has just completed the switch at sites located in 18 cities around the world. All this happened in the space of just eight weeks, with the Apaleo team managing to roll out multiple properties per day.

PMS migrations have traditionally been highly difficult to execute, but the teams at Apaleo and citizenM believe this will have been the fastest onboarding for any mid-sized hotel group to date, owing to modern, self-service architecture, plug-and-play onboarding, and scalable project management. 

Together, citizenM and Apaleo, worked as partners on state-of-the-art program management that unlocked the ability to take multiple properties live simultaneously, following successful data migration from legacy systems and the complete change of the tech stack. The migration included every citizenM hotel in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Geneva, Glasgow, London, Paris, Rome, Zurich, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Miami, Austin, Seattle and Washington DC. Significantly, all of the installations were remotely managed without going on site for any aspect of the implementation.

Mike Rawson, CIO of citizenM, commented: “The migration was a hugely ambitious project, requiring very detailed planning for many hotels across the globe. Compared to any other PMS of similar size and scope, it was the quickest implementation ever witnessed in our industry. Our congratulations go to our fantastic citizenM team and to everyone at Apaleo, who have proven to be such valuable partners.”

“Our decision to adopt an API-first platform is futureproofing our business and guaranteeing our ability to move with the times and create exactly the kind of guest experience we want for our guests. Beyond a mere PMS migration, our initiative embraces numerous components and leverages the Apaleo Store to enhance our service capabilities.”

Philip von Ditfurth, Co-founder and Managing Director of Apaleo, added: “For years, citizenM has been associated with pushing the boundaries of what technology can achieve in hospitality, so it was only logical that we would eventually join forces. The team at citizenM are as passionate as we are about the transformational power of digitisation and personalisation. They want to stay ahead of the game with a digital guest journey that is unique and helps define them as a brand, and we’re going to help deliver that. This project was important because it also demonstrated to other operators labouring under the weight of legacy PMS systems that implementation time is no longer a reason to delay modernisation. It’s now a seamless process with no business interruption.”