Unifying multiple brands for a global hospitality group with Drupal 9

:: PROJECT FOCUS ::

DRUPAL 9 UPGRADE
ACQUIA SITE FACTORY
MULTISITE ENHANCEMENTS

ACQUIA CONTENT HUB
THIRD-PARTY INTEGRATION
CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT

Unifying multiple brands for a global hospitality group with Drupal 9 Multisite
case study

Client Overview

Founded in 1983, our client is a leading global hospitality group of Thai origin. They currently have 81 deluxe and first-class properties across all of the major tourist destinations in the Kingdom, as well as a further 34 hotels and resorts in the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Laos, China, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. 

 

Project Overview

Our client’s digital properties were migrated from a custom-made CMS to Drupal 8. However managing content for 8 different web properties was still a cumbersome task for their marketing team. We partnered with Acquia and our client to enhance, develop and launch their master website and 7 brand sites in Drupal 9. We also enhanced their multisite platform built leveraging Acquia Cloud Site Factory and Acquia Content Hub for content syndication. We also enable location-based content and ensured a seamless and independent content authoring experience for their marketing team.

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Websites launched in 9 months

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Content authoring freedom

The client wanted to enhance the content syndication and management of their Drupal 8 websites with: 

Client Requirements

  • Upgrading 8 sites to Drupal 9

  • Location-based content for multiple geographies 

  • Seamless content syndication from their master site to 7 brand sites via Acquia ContentHub

  • 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.

Unifying multiple brands for a global hospitality group with Drupal 9 Multisite

Our Solutions

Content syndication

Our client’s master site was the publishing site and their 7 brand sites were the subscribers. The client leveraged Acquia’s content hub, however, there were configuration issues that prohibited Acquia content hub to syndicate content. Our team resolved these configuration issues to ensure seamless discovering, aggregating, delivering, and syndicating of content from the master site to 7 brand sites.

Component-based architecture

The client’s digital ecosystem was leveraging components, our 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

With different offers being created for different geographies, the client wanted region-specific content to be syndicated on respective brand sites. We enabled content localization by providing a location field to each of these offers, thereby syndicating relevant offers to the brand websites.

Drupal 9 upgrade

The client wanted to upgrade their Drupal 8 sites to the latest version, Drupal 9. We 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.  

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 our team made the necessary customizations leveraging Drupal’s custom modules. 

Multisite platform enhancement 

The multisite platform was developed leveraging Acquia Cloud Site Factory. Our 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.

Unifying multiple brands for a global hospitality group with Drupal 9 Multisite
We offered a robust CMS platform system with a seamless user authoring experience that allowed the client's digital marketing team to create and edit web pages effortlessly.

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 

We leveraged Drupal 9 for its multilingual capabilities and multi-site capabilities & Acquia Content Hub for content syndication.

Technology Stack