Holidays help to inject enjoyable serotonin and adventurous adrenaline away from our mundane daily existence.
Yet such trips are only possible through extensive planning, which in turn involves plenty of stress and frustration. Tabs pile up during the research stage. You jump from site to site. Fill in endless forms. Check bank accounts. And wait those nail-biting 5-10 seconds after you pay for confirmation.
These accumulating frustrations led to Swiss tourism information and technology company Alturos Destinations to set up Destination OS in order to better support the overall tourist experience.
The new operating system unifies the digitally disparate industry by pulling together customer management processes and streamlining sales. 
Rather than scouring multiple digital spaces, holidaymakers can plan, reserve, and pay in one location.
Although simplistic in its usage for its users, creating it turned out to be the opposite, having to tie together different technologies as well as capabilities. In fact, a total of 1,000 hours of development was spent on the project.
Maximizing flexibility & scalability
Alturos Destinations began looking for a platform that was able to tick off a number of characteristics: headlessness so that it could deliver better omnichannel experiences; the ability to integrate with other technologies.
The platform that fit this best was Contentful.
The scalability capabilities of Contentful in addition to its cloud storage added immediate value to the customers of Alturos Destinations. “Some of our clients have more than 280,000 entries in their content hubs,” Lisa Steurer, the company’s digital marketing and content strategist.
Destination OS provides users total control over the app menu and layout through Contentful’s content models. “Vacations are deeply connected to emotions,” said Lisa, “so we take a storytelling approach that kindles a desire to travel, explore, adventure.”
Lisa adds that, “the goal is to convince site visitors to vacation at customer destinations. To achieve this, we balance classic content elements – hero images, text, grids, quotes, galleries, links and different layout options – with unique features that allow site visitors to save and favorite what they enjoy. A lot of what we serve shop visitors is dynamically displayed and based on different parameters – it’s personalized really.”
The tag feature of Contentful has a big role in the organization of all content that is on both the front-end and back-end. With details such as interests, regions, and dates, their customers can get closer to finding a trip they’re interested in going on. 
Based on this, Alturos Destinations made their content model library universal. Those functionalities and features that had been built for one client can now be implemented in a project for another client.
Better brand consistency
“We supply clients with many different content widgets so they can be creative in how they curate a page or story,” said Lisa. “They are restricted when it comes to a product itself, but that offers benefits. They can be creative in layout and content but not certain elements, like color, which play into brand guidelines and exist for a reason.
Lisa goes on to say that “It’s beneficial for the end-user to distinguish a brand easily and know they’ve found what they’re looking for.”
The company knows the importance of creating a unified brand identity across its digital presence in order to build trust and loyalty.
Alturos’ developers, besides being able to set up design restrictions within content types, put plenty of emphasis on governance and customizing roles and permissions.
“Each team has its own tag and, with the user roles and permissions we set up, we can dictate which individuals see which tags,” said Christian Mairitsch, its head of marketing technology.
“We provide the governance essential for establishing workflows and building a strong content strategy,” he added. “It’s not just about putting content on a webpage or app. It’s about doing it as a team – deciding who is responsible for what and how things are communicated.”
Looking ahead
Alturos Destinations has plans to launch new shops as its Destination OS gains popularity. And this entails increasing its Contentful training for its clients.
The company is seeing its customers quickly getting comfortable with the platform, with yet other aspects, such as its composable architecture, needing a higher learning curve.
To overcome this, Alturos created resources that build out of the information in the Contentful Learning Center, so that its customers become confident on the platform.
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