Overview

pFounded in 1937, Icelandair is a leading airline offering flights to and from Iceland, and an attractive option for cross-Atlantic flights. Icelandair provides safe, reliable flights and exceptional service on flights to metropolitan areas on both sides of the Atlantic./p pIcelandair provides flights to metropolitan areas on both sides of the Atlantic, providing up to 600 flights per week with up to 12,000 passengers a day./p

Supernova Award Category

Tech Optimization and Modernization

The Problem

pAfter years of using VYRE Unify as its web management platform, Icelandair decided to move to a modern headless CMS to answer the increasing demand for personalization and omnichannel delivery. After launching their new site on dotCMS, it became clear the open source platform was unable to meet the Icelandair’s relationship-based content design, integration requirements, and lacked the option to preview the results./p pHallur Þór Halldórsson, a UX writer at Icelandair, explains, “When you posted a page, you'd have to confirm that no one was working on the item in other languages. It pulled everything—all locales, all relationships. It took forever." The system's batch publishing that was supposed to work within seconds ended up taking 30 to 40 minutes. Plus, it was fragile. Instead of resolving issues, the dotCMS vendor continuously applied hotfixes—which inevitably caused system-wide malfunctions when making the smallest site updates./p pAdditionally, dotCMS could not handle webhooks, which made it difficult to integrate with different applications./p pSince the vendor insisted the problem was with Icelandair and not with their platform, the airline felt that support was lacking and quickly realized it was time for a better solution./p

The Solution

pAfter testing 15 CMS providers, Icelandair chose Contentstack to replace dotCMS./p p"The Contentstack system is easy to use,” Halldórsson said. “It's pretty obvious and self-explanatory so we've never had any issues with learning the way the system works.” /p pIcelandair also chose Contentstack because of their white-glove customization, smooth integration and implementation workflow. Including migration from their previous vendor, Icelandair had Contentstack up and running in just three weeks./p pSays Halldórsson, "Contentstack makes it easy to do integrations! We had not been able to integrate with additional systems because of lost time debugging and addressing operational issues. Contentstack let us find the time to do integrations rather than having to extinguish fires continually! The ability to store translations, the handling of locales and the multilingual approach was a defining factor for choosing Contentstack."
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The results

pHalldórsson praises the benefits of the system, "Using Contentstack we can work faster and respond quicker to things,” Halldórsson continues, “The ease of use is a significant factor. Simplicity in the UI, both for content editors and technically savvy people, has helped us."/p pSpeed of publishing has had a wide-scale impact. After moving to Contentstack, Icelandair cut the time it takes to push out promotions by over 90 percent!/p pBefore Contentstack, translations required manual updates for each language. Today content managers send entries for translation directly in the CMS. Icelandair’s 20 content managers can now send entries for translation directly in the CMS to deliver content in 12 languages across 16 locales./p pAnother significant benefit of Contentstack is being able to integrate with best-of-breed applications and implement automation to make publishing more effective and efficient./p p“One reason Icelandair chose Contentstack was how well the team responded to requests.” Many features Icelandair asked for did not yet exist but were quickly added to the system. Contentstack is known for its customer support and was recently named a Customer’s Choice in Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’: Web Content Management. The platform received the highest overall rating (4.7/5) and peer reviews, lauded Contenstack’s ease of use, advanced integration framework and customer service./p

Metrics

ul liCut publishing time by 90%: Said Hallur, “Contentstack improved our workflows as well. Contentstack was amazing for cutting down content publishing time over 90% for promotions like special offers and packages the waiting time including caching is reduced down to minutes. Because of the previous system issues content was published in bigger batches since it took so long to get the content published. Now content is published more frequently because the content is published without any issues.”/li liScalability -- more than 20 content editors and 16+ developers working continuously in the system: People are now more comfortable working with and updating the content. One primary issue that Contentstack has proved extremely helpful is user role management. According to Hallur, “Contentstack’s user role management is way more straightforward than it was in the previous system. Recently there was an update to role management that makes managing users nice and easy. Now it is possible to restrict users down to the field level which is awesome.” /li liIncreased content production: Because of the previous system issues content was published in bigger batches since it took so long to get the content published. Now content is published more frequently because the content is published without any issues.  /li /ul

The Technology

pContentstack is the pioneering API-first enterprise SaaS platform at the intersection of content management and digital experiences. The first headless content management system (CMS) to address the needs of business users and developers alike, Contentstack enables business and IT to easily collaborate, removing silos between business units. Built for scalability, reliability and security, Contentstack has been proven many times over to be enterprise-grade and robust./p

Disruptive Factor

pContentstack proved the ability to quickly and easily integrate with other systems and applications being used by the Icelandair team. Unlike many CMS vendors - including the 14 other vendors Icelandair evaluated when looking for a CMS replacement - Contentstack makes integrations easy. One example of integrations being faster and easier was integrating Algolia search to develop unique search and discovery experiences for both support and global searches. The integration between Contentstack and Algolia was simple./p pAdditionally, Hallur notes, “Contentstack makes it easy to do integrations. We had not been able to integrate with additional systems because of lost time debugging and attacking operation issues. Contentstack let us find the time to do integrations rather than having to extinguish fires continually. We now have five or more microservices that are working with content.”/p

Shining Moment

pContentstack brought a new level of stability and simplicity that reduced the stress of having to focus on fire drills continually. Moving to Contentstack helped Icelandair achieve integration goals, such as personalization. Training and managing users and setting up workflows is now much easier. Using Contentstack is opening new growth opportunities for Icelandair to scale and publish omnichannel content more frequently and faster. /p