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. We worked with their team to design and deliver 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 endeavors. This initiative is 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. They needed a platform that would be flexible, affordable and customisable, so it was built using Drupal 8 because of the options it offered to support that. The web-based database allows tourism operators to manage information about their business and services such as accommodation, activities, tours, or travel planning in multiple languages.

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. The modern web interface makes it easy for them to view current deals, add new ones, and easily push them through to appear on the newzealand.com website. We tested the new designs with tour operators from around the country and used an iterative process to implement their feedback and then test again.

On a technical note, 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.