Grupo Posadas Customer Story
Grupo Posadas reduces website cost of ownership by 40% with CIGNEX, Alfresco and Liferay
Results
- Reduced Web site total cost of ownership (TCO) by 40 percent
- Increased revenue per available room rates
- Improved the online experience for potential customers
- Increased brand recognition
- Established real time content publishing
- Reduced content storage costs
- Improved the accuracy of portal search results
Challenge
With the rise of popular internet-based travel sites and growing competition, Grupo Posadas, the largest Latin American hotel chain operator, was facing a number of new challenges. The company’s revenue per available room rates were not growing as expected, guests were not able to effectively develop an emotional connection to its brands and the company could not easily promote online offers to its customers and partners. As a result, Posadas needed to re-examine its Web strategy for its eight hotel brands and 112 hotels.
Its existing J2EE and Documentum-based Web sites were cumbersome to manage, lacked appropriate workflows, and made updating site content difficult. Sites often contained duplicate content, took a long to time upload and returned inaccurate search results. In addition, managing multiple sites were becoming too costly to support.
Posadas needed to build a stronger online presence for customers that would provide an emotional connection to its brands and deliver content through multiple online channels including social media.
The company realized that its decentralized legacy Web strategy made it difficult to respond to evolving business practices and customer expectations. In order to provide a richer online experience, the company needed an integrated Web strategy based on open standards that would provide a flexible and cost effective internet architecture for years to come.
Solution
Posadas selected CIGNEX, a global leader in Enterprise Open Source Solutions and Platinum Partner to both Alfresco and Liferay, to build and implement an Integrated Content Management Portal (ICMP) leveraging the strengths of Alfresco Enterprise Content Management and Liferay 6, an open source portal and social collaboration solution. Posadas was impressed with CIGNEX expertise and proven track record successfully helping hundreds of companies worldwide implement Alfresco and Liferay technologies.
Within six months, CIGNEX successfully implemented Phase One of the Alfresco and Liferay ICMP which can now support over 2,000 users and 750 concurrent users. With the open, flexible architecture, CIGNEX can customize the company portals to fit its evolving business needs. CIGNEX also included robust security in each portal with data encryption, audit/compliance reporting and advancedaccess controls with secure access to legacy systems.
With Alfresco as the document management (DM) and Web content management (WCM) system, Posadas can easily create real time sales promotions on its Fiesta Americana, Live Aqua, Fiesta Americana Grand and Caesar Park Web sites as well as across partner sites. This allows the company to quickly respond to market demands and stay competitive.
Using Alfresco’s content as a service platform, the Posadas content repository is accessible anywhere, anytime through a single point of access and control.
Employees have flexible editing options and can work offline, online or in update modes. CIGNEX created advanced workflows in Alfresco for all the Posadas brands creating uniformity and making it easier to manage portal content. More importantly, Alfresco and Liferay’s support for social collaboration has allowed Posadas to integrate social media into its Web strategy incorporating blogs, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This provides a richer experience for users and allows customers to connect with the hotel brands in a new ways.
Conclusion
CIGNEX has completed the first phase of the Alfresco and Liferay implementation rolling out new portal sites across four of the eight hotel brands. Since the launch of the new portals, the company has seen its revenue per room rates increase. The new portals provide a personalized experience for potential guests and have been well received by online users.
For the Posadas marketing and Web team, the new portals are easier to manage and publish content to in multiple languages. No longer does it take days or weeks to roll out new promotions or content to the sites, Posadas’ marketing team can create content, get it approved through built in workflows, test it and publish it in a matter of minutes. This allows Posadas to have a more interactive portal and respond quickly to changing customer behaviors.
In addition to improving the company’s brand recognition, the new portal is extremely cost effective. Posadas has seen a 40 percent reduction in total cost of ownership with the new Alfresco and Liferay implementation from its previous legacy solution. With Alfresco and Liferay there are no upfront licensing costs and technology subscriptions include support, maintenance and upgrades making it an extremely cost effective alternative. Both technologies are developed on Java allowing the Posadas IT team to leverage its existing technical skills without the need to hire expensive platform experts. Providing further cost savings, the centralized repository has also reduced content storage costs.
Next Steps
CIGNEX is continuing to roll out Phase Two of the project across the remaining Posada hotel brands.