Background
Tourism New Zealand is responsible for promoting New Zealand to international and domestic travellers by marketing New Zealand and providing platforms, services and support to businesses and organisations that support New Zealand’s tourism industry.
Catalyst worked with Tourism New Zealand in delivering the final step in a programme of work to rebuild the legacy, monolithic newzealand.com platform into a set of independent, modern components that could provide the basis for future initiatives.
Solution
To complete the programme of work, Catalyst worked with Tourism New Zealand to design and build the Tourism Business Database – a central repository for tour operators and business connected to New Zealand’s tourism industry to manage their products and deals.
Generic, reusable single sign-on and API gateway components were split off into platform services so that they could be shared across other web-based systems.
“Catalyst was instrumental in delivering Tourism New Zealand's new web application based on modern, scalable Open Source technology. Catalyst's solution provides us with a solid platform from which we can continue to meet the needs of New Zealand tourism operators.” – Scott Noble, Digital Technology Manager at Tourism New Zealand.
Open source roadmap
Catalyst worked with Tourism New Zealand to build a replacement that would stand the test of time. Tourism New Zealand needed a platform that would be flexible, affordable and customisable. The Tourism Business Database was built using Drupal 8, one of the most robust and scalable open source frameworks for building anything from modern content-rich websites to enterprise-level applications.
The web-based Tourism Business Database allows tourism operators to manage information about their business and services such as accommodation, activities, tours, or travel planning in multiple languages. Content added can be accessed by public-facing applications, including newzealand.com, via Kong’s robust API framework.
The Tourism Business Database also provides Tourism New Zealand with an extensive range of tools for managing operators, ensuring content is of a consistent quality. Tourism New Zealand administrators use an admin portal built using Drupal’s workflow management tools to align with Tourism New Zealand’s internal processes. Here Tourism New Zealand administrators can see a list of content submitted by businesses that's awaiting their approval, which enables an easy efficient workflow for them.
Implementing open source with agility
Catalyst used cloud native technologies, Kubernetes clusters on the Catalyst Cloud, for the new Tourism New Zealand site. This approach ensures that Tourism New Zealand can adapt their hosting requirements to their business needs as they evolve, such as scaling their resource usage as demand changes. This technology also means that changes and new sites can be tested and rolled out quickly and reliably (automated CI/CD).
Catalyst continues to collaborate with Tourism New Zealand, as well as hosting them on Catalyst Cloud.
