How Alpitour World Transformed Its Core Systems for the Future

Overview

For over 75 years, Alpitour World, one of Europe’s leading tourism groups, has built its reputation on quality, professionalism, and continuous innovation. With over €2 billion in annual revenue and a diversified portfolio spanning hotels, travel agencies, aviation, and tour operations, the company operates in a highly dynamic, customer-centric industry. But like many established enterprises, Alpitour World faced a growing tension: how to preserve the reliability of its core systems while evolving fast enough to meet modern business demands.

Recognizing that legacy systems could limit future agility, Alpitour World’s leadership made a bold, forward-looking decision: to modernize its core mainframe applications and align IT with long-term business growth. This was a strategic transformation aimed at reducing operational costs, mitigating skills risk, and enabling a more flexible, cloud-ready architecture.

To execute it, Alpitour World partnered with Kyndryl and Astadia, combining global infrastructure expertise with deep specialization in mainframe refactoring, and selecting experts with a strong track record in delivering complex, large-scale modernization programs.

The Scale of Change

Alpitour World’s mainframe systems had long supported mission-critical operations, making modernization both essential and complex. The scope was significant:

• Over 7 million lines of COBOL code to be converted to Java
• More than 1,000 Db2 tables, VSAM files, to be migrated
• Over 1,000 JCL procedures to be transformed
• Legacy 3270 interfaces to be modernized for web environments

Alpitour World’s leadership team knew this would be a complex, large-scale project. They needed a migration strategy capable of delivering functional equivalence in the cloud, with predictable costs and timelines. They wanted partners who had a proven track record of delivering successful outcomes, on time and on budget.

Two key challenges emerged:

• Testing complexity: No predefined test dataset was available for validation. This required an approach capable of safely leveraging production-scale data to ensure accuracy and completeness.
• Time constraints: The entire transformation needed to be completed within a 1.5-year timeframe, and critically, before peak seasonal demand, to avoid business disruption.

The company had recently renewed their long-standing partnership with Kyndryl, the world's largest provider of IT infrastructure services. Kyndryl turned to Astadia as a trustworthy partner with a proven track record and guaranteed outcomes.

The alliance enabled Kyndryl to leverage Astadia's specialized expertise, tools, and accelerators for complex legacy-to-cloud migrations, making the combined capabilities of the two companies particularly effective for this high-visibility, mission-critical transformation.

From Legacy Constraint to Strategic Advantage

Deployed on Amazon Web Services, the new environment was designed to deliver both scalability and long-term cost efficiency.

The transformation was delivered using Astadia’s FastTrack tooling and process, a proven methodology for success. This included automated conversion of COBOL programs to Java, migration of data models (DB2 z/OS and VSAM) to Db2 LUW on AWS, transformation of JCL to Bash scripts, and refactoring of online interfaces (3270 to web browser XML streams).

Testing played a central role throughout. Using proprietary tools such as TestMatch and DataMatch, the teams validated not only functional equivalence but also performance across both online and batch processes.

Performance optimization, in fact, became one of the most demanding aspects of the program. Achieving target KPIs required close collaboration, iterative tuning, and deep mainframe expertise, underscoring that modernization is as much about systems understanding as it is about code transformation.

A Blueprint for Successful Transformation

Sixteen months after kickoff, the new platform went into production on AWS in October 2025. It was a full transition of mission-critical workloads from mainframe to cloud, executed without business interruption.

The Project was delivered on schedule and within budget, demonstrating the effective collaboration of Alpitour World, Kyndryl and Astadia’s teams and earning positive reviews and high visibility across the organizations.

This migration helped Alpitour World’s IT leadership team to successfully deliver on their promises of lower operating costs, reduced risk, and strategic alignment with the company’s new architectural blueprint.

Just as importantly, the transformation demonstrated that large-scale refactoring, often seen as high-risk, can be executed predictably when supported by the right combination of automation, methodology, and expertise.

The collaboration between Alpitour World, Kyndryl and Astadia highlights a broader industry lesson: successful modernization is not driven by tools alone, but by the integration of business and IT objectives alignment, proven solutions, domain expertise, and disciplined execution.

For organizations facing similar challenges, Alpitour World’s journey offers a clear message: modernization at scale is achievable without compromising business continuity when it is treated as a strategic transformation and executed with the right partners.

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