Lake Wānaka Tourism

Promoting member businesses typically means maintaining member listings. Not only listings for members’ businesses, but also event listings, and listings for attractions like local walks. But creating high quality member listings takes time, and the bigger the RTO, the more effort’s invested in their member listings.

In 2016, Lake Wānaka Tourism built a tourism member listing management portal and went through the arduous process of inviting all their members to create new listings. Each listing was created by a local business, then proofed, edited, and published by the Lake Wānaka team. Often, there was back and forth as the team coached members to create better listings.

Lake Wānaka is a relatively small tourism website. We maintain one site with 17,000 + member listings, and that’s not even the largest listing machine we’ve built or managed. As we write this case study, Wanaka has 505 member listings and 297 event listings. But even that number of listings represents many hundreds of hours of work.

So, when Lake Wānaka Tourism decided to rebuild their website in 2021, they were keen not to repeat the whole member listings rigmarole. Instead, they decided to spin off their member listing portal as a standalone platform and create an API ( a universal way for computer programs to communicate with each other), so no matter what websites and apps they built in the future, their member listings would be compatible with their marketing plans.

Lake Wānaka Tourism engaged Publica to design and build their new site. But Wānaka’s member listings portal was built in Silverstripe, and Publica are a WordPress shop. So, Publica needed a digital partner who could help evolve and manage member listings for their client.

That’s where we came in. Not only are we confident Silverstripe developers, but we’ve many years’ experience building member listing solutions for tourism destinations, and we’re familiar with the listing portal Lake Wānaka use.

The way the portal works is local businesses and tourism operators set up an account and create business and event listings. When members submit a new listing, the Lake Wānaka team get a notification and go through a process to review, improve, and approve the listing.

The portal needed a few upgrades, including:

• Creating a new type of listing for walking tracks.

• Integrating web cam feeds from around the Wānaka region.

• Creating plugins so the member listings portal can integrate data from third-party sources such as Tourism New Zealand, TripAdvisor, Google Places, Eventfinda, and Eventbrite.

• New dashboards for more efficient member reporting.

Tess Hellebrekers, Online Executive for Lake Wānaka Tourism explains, “Hello Better Digital manage our destination portal. It’s twofold, members have a login to manage their business listings and submit event listings, then the destination portal talks to our WordPress site and all our listings get sent to our site by the API. We're also using the destination portal as a tool to talk to our Wānaka walking track app. So again, we update and maintain all the information on tracks through the portal and the API exports the track listings to our track app.”

“The reason we went down the track of managing our member listings separately from our website, is so we're not tied to one agency or to one CMS. So, if we decide we don’t want to use WordPress anymore, we've still got our listings and we just use the API to link to whatever other CMS we use. And the listings portal is multifunctional. If we want to do a mini site with listings for a marketing campaign, then again, it's easy.”

“Hello Better Digital work well together with Publica. They talk to each other and they seem to be onto it between them on who’s doing what. It's pretty straightforward really. If we ask for something, it’s never a problem. The Hello Better Digital team are calm and unflappable, they’re very quick at coming back to me and fixing things up, and they’re a lot cheaper as well ... Two hours with Hello Better Digital equals one with our other digital agency.”

One of Hello Better Digital’s strengths is large data integration projects like member listing portals. The main technical complexity in a member listing portal comes from the integration of multiple databases and data sources. Lake Wānaka’s portal integrates 20+ data sources and we’ve worked on over 100 large data projects, often far more complex than this.

Our approach to integrating different data sources has evolved over the years. Now we favour programming plugins for each data source. This is the approach we use for Lake Wānaka Tourism, Taranaki Regional Council, Whangerei District Council, and Horowhenua District.

The beauty of the plugin approach is its flexibility, as each council and RTO’s data integration requirements are different. Some want to pull in job listings from recruitment sites, others specialised event listings for entrepreneurs, others Trade Me data. Pulling in data from multiple sources has its own challenges. For example, we pull in regional event listings, but some events are posted on both Eventfinda and Eventbrite, so we program to prevent duplication.

Not only do we solve data integration puzzles, but each member listing portal has its own nuance. Lake Wānaka approve each listing, but Whangerei District Council don’t because they’ve a very small team, and don’t have the resource. So, their listings creation process is fully automated. It’s all about customising the data solution to fit your organisation’s needs.