The adults-only cruise line supports experiences across a huge range of channels on land and at sea with Magnolia DXP

Providing digital experiences for guests, crew members, and partners requires multiple channels—from a marketing website and travel agent site to mobile apps and digital screens onboard the cruise ships. From the start, the Virgin Voyages team knew they wanted a single content management system (CMS) to support all those channels. 

“Managing content for numerous digital channels can be extremely complicated,” says Diana Quintero, senior director, application development and quality assurance for Virgin Voyages. “The Virgin Voyages team that initially built our tech stack wanted to keep all the web copy, images, videos, guest itinerary information, and other content in a centralized system.”

As the team constructed its digital experience architecture, the potential challenges of system integration became clear. In particular, the Virgin Voyages team needed to integrate the CMS with a custom platform they had developed with a small outside firm. That platform provides core digital services as well as the intermediary layer between the front-end website and back-end systems, such as Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM). “The CMS had to connect with our bespoke platform without requiring extensive integration work,” says Quintero.

Given the number of digital channels, extensive array of content and around the clock needs of a cruise ship, the Virgin Voyages digital team knew that sending every new publishing request through IT or a central publishing team wouldn’t be feasible. The team wanted to enable business users—both shoreside and on ships—to update content on digital channels quickly and easily.

The Virgin Voyages team worked with system integrator Capgemini to evaluate available CMS offerings. “The team wanted to find a headless CMS that could provide the right balance of cost and features that could support our complex content needs,” says Quintero. “After considering other options, Capgemini helped guide the company toward Magnolia DXP. Magnolia gives us the flexibility to support a large number of digital channels and connect with multiple systems, all with ease.”

The team recognized that Magnolia could also help future-proof the tech stack. “Magnolia’s modular, API-first architecture gives developers a wide range of tools to personalize the CMS and adjust it to changing business needs,” says Quintero.

By using Magnolia to deliver headless content, Virgin Voyages can create and manage content in a single, central hub and then reuse content across numerous digital channels—including   multiple websites and applications plus additional channels on ships, such as digital displays and in-room tablets. In all, Magnolia supports 22 custom applications, 52 workspaces, and 88 unique node types. 

“We manage over 1,000 live pages and nearly 49,000 local assets within the platform,” says Bettina Saburido, digital product manager, Virgin Voyages. 

In addition to supporting the virginvoyages.com website, Magnolia delivers content to the booking platform, the company’s firstmates.com travel agent site, crew apps, an embarkation app, and the Virgin Voyages Sailor mobile app. The Sailor app enables guests to easily prepare for trips, make reservations for onboard events, explore shoreside activities, order food, enter virtual queues for restaurants, pay for drinks onboard, and more, which requires deep integration with external systems. 

The company also uses Magnolia to manage content for onboard cabin technologies and digital screens. The shoreside operations team manages any pre-planned content used on ships, but each ship also has a content manager that can make last-minute itinerary changes or other updates.

“We now have ships all over the world, so content changes can happen at any given moment,” says Ana Gonzalez, scrum master/program manager for digital experience. “With the Magnolia platform, content managers on ships have the ability to make urgent changes whenever they need to.”

The Magnolia platform’s caching capabilities help ensure that website and app users have responsive, low-latency experiences, wherever they are. “Our average response time is around 374 ms,” says Quintero. “Whether customers are exploring possible destinations, booking a trip, or planning activities onboard a ship, they can navigate to what they need on any of our digital channels fast.”

Virgin Voyages maintains that performance while supporting approximately 30 TB of traffic per month. “Magnolia’s distributed architecture provides strong scalability and high performance, even during peak traffic,” says Quintero.  “We know we can keep delivering outstanding experiences as our customer base expands.”

Integrating a CMS with the existing, custom platform used by Virgin Voyages might have been difficult with some solutions. But Magnolia’s composability simplified the process. 

“The Magnolia API is really solid,” says Quintero. “We didn’t have to do a lot of complex integration, even to connect with our bespoke platform. Overall, it’s the ease of integration that has allowed us to use Magnolia with so many different applications.”

In fact, since the initial deployment, the Virgin Voyages team has capitalized on Magnolia’s deep integration capabilities to support a range of business-critical operations. “The platform is highly extensible,” says Quintero. “So far, we’ve built 27 custom modules that respond to key business needs.”

With the Magnolia platform, the Virgin Voyages team has avoided obstacles to authoring and publishing new content. “In some companies, publishing new content on a website is a long process that requires an IT ticket,” says Quintero. “We want to leave content authoring and publishing in the hands of business users. And fortunately, our business users are very comfortable using the Magnolia interface.”

Magnolia’s ease of use also enables new team members to get up to speed quickly. “Magnolia is super user friendly,” says Saburido. “The interface is simple to navigate, and the organization of apps and folders is very logical. We can onboard new content editors and publishers rapidly.”

Meanwhile, the interface design reduces the complexity of ongoing management. “We can quickly see whether something is published or not published, and identify which components have been used and how many pages they’re used on,” says Gonzalez. “It makes planning and migrating content much simpler.”

When a company depends on a platform for supporting multiple, business-critical websites and applications, reliability is key. And the Virgin Voyages team knows they can depend on Magnolia to continuously deliver exceptional digital experiences that help keep revenues flowing. “It’s a very stable platform. I can’t remember the last time we had a CMS-related issue,” says Quintero.

Looking toward the horizon, the Virgin Voyages team is eager to explore additional Magnolia offerings, such as the Magnolia DX Cloud managed infrastructure solution and Magnolia’s AI capabilities. “The more we can tap into out-of-the-box solutions from Magnolia, the faster we can advance toward our business objectives,” says Gonzalez. “We started so strongly with Magnolia, and we’re looking forward to a bright future together.”

“We’ve been operating as a startup, building our digital experiences from scratch,” says Quintero. “Through our partnership with Magnolia, we’ve navigated some key technical and business challenges—like the effects of the pandemic on the travel industry. The Magnolia team has listened to us and helped us find ways to achieve our goals. That’s had a huge impact on our success.”