Benefits of Storyblok for Travel & Hospitality

In a world where booking a trip is just a click away, travelers require instant access to information, seamless booking processes, and personalized service at their fingertips. This shift has pushed travel companies to innovate and adopt new technologies to stay competitive. By integrating top-tier solutions for booking engines, payment gateways, and personalization, businesses can create exceptional digital experiences that meet both operational needs and customer expectations.

Teaming up with EM Code, our expert partner in crafting seamless digital experiences for the travel industry, we delved into how headless architecture can overcome industry challenges and how Storyblok can be a game-changer.

Intuitive UX for marketers for seamless personalization

In the competitive travel and hospitality industry, outstanding UX enhances user retention and satisfaction. To achieve this, travel websites must be highly customizable to meet industry demands, incorporating custom workflows for service catalogs, bookings, customer portals, and dynamic pricing.

Storyblok equips marketers with a suite of features and tools that enable the creation of tailor-made customer experiences in the travel industry:

• Visual Editor - empowers non-technical staff to manage content autonomously, which is critical in an industry that frequently updates offers, promotions, and travel advisories.
• Predefined blocks - ideal for creating engaging travel content like destination highlights, promotional banners, interactive maps, and booking call-to-action buttons.
• Reusable components - crafted for saving, experimenting, and arranging to boost reusability, ideal for creating destination guides, booking forms, customer reviews, and promotional content.
• Advanced SEO features - vital for ad personalization and content findability, ensuring the website is optimized for search engines and easily accessible to potential customer segments.

Omnichannel consistency

Travelers engage through various channels. Some may prefer booking via a website, others might opt for an app, and some might use a combination of touchpoints. To create an immersive user journey, it's crucial to choose a digital solution that manages and delivers content across all potential channels, and to construct an omnichannel strategy that ensures consistent branding, messaging, and service across all digital touchpoints.

Storyblok and its headless, API-first strategy ensures that:

• Content can be delivered across all customer touchpoints, from websites and mobile apps to social media and in-hotel displays, providing a unified experience.
• Travel and hospitality businesses can ensure that the same content, booking, or reservation functionalities are available no matter how or where customers interact.
• With its integrated Asset Manager, Storyblok allows you to store all the assets in one place, ensuring consistency across travel offers, trip catalogs, client portals, travel and hospitality blogs, booking pages, etc.

Real-time availability & scalability

Another important factor in choosing a suitable CMS for a travel/hospitality project is its potential to scale in the future. These platforms need to handle real-time updates in availability (e.g., flights and hotel rooms), especially during peak travel times. Ensuring minimal downtime and latency is essential, as it helps protect and potentially increase revenue, and provides a smooth and comfortable journey for the end user.

The cloud-native architecture of Storyblok, particularly when integrated with other technologies, ensures:

• Exceptional scalability, even during peak travel seasons or significant promotional campaigns.
• Allowing critical systems like booking engines and payment gateways to handle demand surges seamlessly without experiencing downtime.
• The block-based approach allows businesses to scale their content operations effectively. Content blocks can be reused, reducing duplication of effort and ensuring consistency, which makes scalability faster and easier.

Seamless integrations

One of the key benefits of headless is its ability to integrate with other systems via APIs. Instead of replacing entire systems, travel and hospitality businesses can gradually integrate existing infrastructure while introducing modern, scalable solutions for critical functionalities such as booking, search, CRM, or payment gateways.
Storyblok seamlessly integrates with a variety of tools and services that enhance the industry’s digital platforms:

• Search: Powerful search engines provide fast, relevant results that are crucial in the travel industry for quick access to flights, rooms, and services. Storyblok’s Algolia integration enhances search efficiency with features like faceted search, auto-suggestions, and content search indexing.
• Payment gateways & booking engines: Implementing secure, globally accepted payment solutions (e.g., Stripe, Adyen) is crucial for supporting multiple currencies and payment methods. Storyblok’s API-first design seamlessly integrates with various payment solutions, ensuring smooth and secure transactions.
• Localization: Storyblok offers a range of options for content translation and localization, including integrations with third-party vendors like Lokalise and Smartling. It also provides built-in field-level and folder-level translation features.

Discover our Technology Ecosystem to learn more about our integrations and partnerships that can boost the digital experience of travel and hospitality.

Data Privacy & Compliance

Balancing data collection for personalization, booking requests, and trip-related payments with regulatory compliance is a significant challenge for travel brands. They must ensure that every service, from the payment gateway to the customer data platform, adheres to strict security standards (e.g., GDPR).

Storyblok’s API-first principles enable transparent data flows between systems, efficiently managing consent and data protection:

• The CMS’s services hosted on Amazon AWS ensure top-tier security and compliance
• Storyblok is 27001 certified, offering secure HTTPS, data encryption, two-factor authentication, and regular backups.
• Enterprise plans include SSO, Security Audits, Backup Service, and a 99.9% to 99.99% Uptime SLA Guarantee.

Made with Storyblok: Flybondi

Flybondi, Argentina's top low-cost airline, faced challenges with a cumbersome editing process, increased marketing team dependency on developers for simple changes, and a lack of scalability in their tech stack, including GraphQL and React SDK/API.

The company transitioned from Hygraph to Storyblok in 2020 for its main website, which served three markets in two languages. The robust Visual Editor with drag-and-drop components, overall scalability, and seamless integration of various tools made it a foolproof solution for the airline to expand into new markets and languages. Flybondi also utilized Storyblok for its booking process, incorporating specific components to provide essential reservation details to passengers.

Read full Case Study

Transforming the travel industry with EM Code

We’re proud to help content creators, marketers, and developers build dynamic and future-proof travel and hospitality websites. We’re even more happy to do this with the support of our partner EM Code, whose expertise and passion help clients understand and implement best-of-breed technologies to improve the travel industry.

Visit their website to discover how they craft exceptional digital experiences and transform their travel and hospitality partners into leaders in technology.