How Viking Cruises launched an innovative online booking portal with Magnolia CMS

Viking Cruises needed to satisfy tech-savvy customers around the world who were demanding a self-service booking portal that enabled them to view, book and manage Viking Cruises from desktops, mobile devices and even IoT devices.

Viking Cruises realized this would require a headless CMS solution that facilitates omnichannel delivery. At the same time, the cruise company understood that going headless was only a partial solution. The company also needed a marketer and business-friendly CMS that would simplify workflows, content creation and personalization across devices, regions and market segments. 

Managing a large volume of digital assets and content

Viking Cruises’ continued growth led to an accumulation of over 1 million digital assets. Those assets came in the form of short and long descriptions of their ships, high-resolution images, and many other complex formats to support digital and print mediums.

Viking needed a way to store these assets in a centralized location and also needed simple workflow capabilities to edit, approve and publish the assets collaboratively across global teams and offices. The company also wanted a headless solution that could support omnichannel experiences and knew that flexible content modelling would be crucial.

Viking chose to use Magnolia as a content hub to power its websites and online booking portal. Crucial to this solution are hybrid capabilities, flexible content models, Amazon S3 integration and market-friendly workflows.

Hybrid CMS

Viking uses Magnolia as a headless CMS to power its website with a variety of API calls. The company found an ideal solution between headless and traditional using Magnolia's flexible hybrid capabilities. Magnolia’s ability to provide tailored payloads, with only the relevant data required, allows Viking to deliver contextualized experiences.

Flexible content models and S3 integration

The company also integrated Magnolia with its image repository on the AWS S3 storage service using the Magnolia Amazon S3 Connector module. Using Magnolia’s S3 connector, Viking can view and manage digital assets as if they were residing in Magnolia, yet realize the benefit of scalable asset delivery.  Magnolia also made it easy for Viking to define content models that fit with its complex content and asset relationships, and iteratively change them throughout the implementation process to fine tune the solution.  This flexibility allowed the Viking team to experiment with changes in the content model without sacrificing the go-live date.

Configurable workflows

Most of the solutions Viking looked at had core CMS features, but insufficient capability to tailor the workflow features associated with them. With Magnolia, Viking set up workflows appropriate for the content or asset and the teams responsible for managing them.  With standard configuration, separate review queues and notifications were deployed to streamline the publishing process.

Using Magnolia CMS, Viking was able to launch content-rich websites and an online booking portal in just six weeks. Additionally, the company's content creation process has been reduced from weeks to minutes.

Magnolia’s enterprise-grade workflow management features increased Viking’s operational efficiency, centralized content editing and review, and eliminated the use of disparate tools such as spreadsheets, emails, Slack channels and so forth.

Now Viking has content for its ships, itineraries and activities available for use across its websites - the Viking River Cruises website alone utilizes over 600,000 assets. Most of all, the online booking portal brings Viking seamless digital experiences that's paid for itself in a matter of weeks.