Tourism New Zealand gets a solution that stands the test of time

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.

Opportunity

Tourism New Zealand need a design and rebuild of the Tourism Business Database  – a central repository for tour operators and businesses connected to New Zealand’s tourism industry to manage their products and deals.

Solution

Catalyst worked with Tourism New Zealand (external link)to deliver the final step to rebuild the legacy, monolithic newzealand.com platform into a set of independent, modern components that could provide the basis for future initiatives. Catalyst then worked with Tourism New Zealand to design and build the Tourism Business Database.

Generic, reusable, single sign-on and API gateway components were split into platform services. So the components were sharable across other web-based systems.

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 modern content-rich websites to enterprise-level applications.

The web-based Tourism operators can manage information about their business and services in multiple languages. For instance, accommodation, activities, tours, or travel planning. 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 consistent and quality content. 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 are awaiting their approval, enabling an easy efficient workflow for them.

Implementing open source with agility

Catalyst used cloud-native technologies, Kubernetes clusters on the Catalyst Cloud(external link), 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).