Banyan Tree Group

The Client

Headquartered in Singapore, Banyan Tree Group is one of the world’s leading independent, multi-branded hospitality groups centered on the purpose-driven mission of stewardship and well-being while offering exceptional, design-led experiences. The Group operates over 50 hotels in 15 countries, with over 47 new properties under design and construction. 

The Situation

The hospitality industry around the world was hard hit by the pandemic, and Banyan Tree was no different. Being prudent with operational expenditures during this time unfortunately led to technological segmentation for its multiple brand sites. The company needed a new design system to ensure brand consistency and ease future development of content and webpages. 

The Challenge

Because the company’s multiple brand sites were powered by disparate technologies, making updates was difficult and using dynamic components was impossible. Inefficient content authoring meant that content could only be updated by designers, not non-technical users. And building each site from scratch was time-consuming, slowing time to market and making site maintenance difficult. The company needed a scalable platform to quickly create and launch new hotel brand sites while maintaining strict brand and content structure governance and controlling expenditures. 

The Solution

Banyan partnered with Drupal specialist Pixel Onion to design its new site. The teams created and developed a Drupal 9 site with a new design system that gives Banyan’s content editors greater autonomy to build content efficiently – and stay within the brand guidelines.

To improve the authoring experience for content editors, Pixel Onion developed a flexible and dynamic list of Layout Builder components, creating a Drupal 9 site that could support and create department sites faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Rolling out regular security patches for a multisite architecture is a breeze with the Acquia Cloud Platform. Site and server resource monitoring is enabled by default, which gives Banyan peace of mind. And in the future, when Banyan microsites exceed the multisite architecture’s efficiency, Acquia provides the upgrade path to the Site Factory.

Using Acquia Cloud, Banyan can unify platform updates and maintain security and compliance across its entire network of sites. This allows Banyan to seamlessly manage multiple sites across the various hotel brands.

The Results

The new platform provides a much faster way of building new layouts to suit different content. It allows anyone on the Banyan marketing team – even those without design or technical skills – to easily craft complex pages without requiring help from design or development teams.

By integrating a design system with Drupal 9, Banyan has consistently produced more engaging content across its web platforms. A unified design system gives Banyan a shared library of reusable components and guidelines, allowing its users to build webpages and create content much faster. The increased efficiency and consistency have helped Banyan to be more scalable and digitally sustainable, and new widgets help site visitors book hotel rooms confidently and easily.