By QED42 on

The client is a leading hospitality group in Asia. They own multiple deluxe and first-class properties across major tourist destinations in their home country as well as across different geographies in Asia.

The client’s digital properties included a Drupal 8 master site and 7 brand sites. However managing content for 8 different web properties was a cumbersome task for their marketing team. We collaborated with Acquia to enhance, develop and launch the client’s master website and 7 brand sites on Drupal 9. To ensure a seamless and independent content authoring experience for their marketing team, we enabled location-based content capabilities for their websites

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Why Drupal was chosen: 

The client has 8 sites, one master site, and 7 brand sites. We chose to upgrade all the sites on Drupal for the following reasons and benefits:

  • Drupal’s multisite architecture made it easy to manage all sites, each with unique content and design, from a single installation.
  • To get the most out of Acquia content hub, it was important for all sites to be on Drupal.
  • Component based frontend architecture allowed for all the sites to have consistent look & feel and allowed for re-usability on multiple sites and still giving flexibility for individual websites to manage their own branding and user journeys.   
  • Drupal’s multilingual support caters to a diverse range of international customers who visit the client’s websites for information, booking, and instructions.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

The client wanted to enhance the content syndication and management of their Drupal websites with: 

  • Location-based content for multiple geographies  
  • Seamless content syndication from their master site to 7 brand sites via Acquia Content Hub
  • Integration of a new pricing API for their properties, hotels, rooms, and offers
  • Enhancements to their components and Translation Management Tool
  • Enhancements to their custom e-commerce React-based component.

The Solution

  • Connecting content with the client’s digital ecosystem

Content Syndication helps to connect content created on one site to other sites in the fleet. In this case, the client’s master site was the publishing site and their 7 brand sites were the subscribers. The client leveraged Acquia Content Hub, however, there were configuration issues that prohibited Acquia Content Hub to syndicate content. The team resolved these configuration issues to ensure seamless discovering, aggregating, delivering, and syndicating content from the master site to 7 brand sites.

  • Empowered the marketing team & launched 8 brand sites

The client’s digital ecosystem was leveraging components, the team re-used these pre-existing components and enhanced them to roll out 8 brand sites in record time. The component-based development approach also enabled the content managers to create, edit and manage pages while maintaining consistent brand identity across all websites. 

  • Content Localization

The offers related to hotel properties of different geographies are created on the master website. These offers are then syndicated to the different brand sites through Acquia Content Hub. Since different offers are created for different geographies, the client wanted the content to be syndicated on respective brand sites based on their geography. We enabled content localization by providing a location field to each of these offers, thereby syndicating relevant offers to the brand websites.

  • Pricing API Integration

The Pricing API is used to display the price & offers for our client's hotel properties & rooms. It is a third-party API service that gives prices according to a set of given parameters. The client’s older pricing API tool had no TPS (Transaction Per Second) limit. However, the new Pricing API came with a limit of 5 TPS, in order to incorporate this the team made the necessary customizations leveraging Drupal’s custom modules. 

  • Drupal 9 Upgrade

The client wanted to upgrade their Drupal 8 sites to the latest version, Drupal 9. The team audited their existing sites and removed the deprecated code. The upgrade process also involved making sure their existing Drupal modules and themes were Drupal 9 compatible, upgrading Composer, BLT, and fixing their contrib module dependencies with patches. This resulted in a seamless upgrade and performant Drupal 9 websites.  

  • Multisite Platform Enhancement 

The multisite platform was developed leveraging Acquia Cloud Site Factory. The team automated the content syndication process by creating a custom command to automate the export content from the master site and import it to the relevant brand sites. In order to automate the pricing API functionality, we developed a cron that was executed at regular intervals to fetch the updated price and offers and display them on the respective brand sites.

Business Benefits

  • Empowered the client’s marketing team to roll out websites & launch pages independently 
  • Enabled standardization & faster go-to-market with a set of reusable components and codebase leveraging the Drupal 9 multisite platform 
  • Offered a quick and easy approach to content localization 
  • Seamless content syndication enabled the client to manage content on multiple websites effortlessly

Technical specifications

Drupal version: 
Drupal 9.x
Organizations involved: 
QED42
Sectors: 
Travel and Hospitality

Comments

polliren4’s picture

polliren4 commented

Drupal 9 Multisite allows you to manage multiple websites from a single Drupal installation. Each brand's website can have its own domain, configuration, and content, while sharing a common codebase and infrastructure. Set up a separate subdirectory or subdomain for each brand. Unifying multiple brands within a leading hospitality group using Drupal 9 Multisite and a Decoupled Architecture can be an effective strategy for managing various websites efficiently while offering a consistent and scalable digital experience. Consider implementing a decoupled architecture, where the front-end (presentation layer) is separated from the back-end (content management and logic). mybkexperience.com survey This allows you to use different front-end technologies for each brand while maintaining a consistent back-end CMS. Provide training and support for content editors and administrators to ensure they can manage their respective websites effectively.

Unifying multiple brands using Drupal 9 Multisite and a Decoupled Architecture can streamline your digital operations and offer a consistent yet flexible web experience for each brand within the hospitality group. This approach allows you to maintain brand individuality while benefiting from shared resources and infrastructure.