- Travelodge is undergoing a digital transformation to improve its ecommerce capabilities and link content and commerce more effectively. - It has transitioned to using Headless Drupal for content management and decoupled this from its ecommerce engine to allow each system to fulfill its purpose better. - It implemented Oracle Endeca to improve on-site search and merchandising capabilities which are critical for an effective booking experience. - Upcoming phases will further develop this architecture and transition additional content like landing pages into Endeca to better optimize for search and conversion.

1. Linking Content and Commerce
The Travelodge journey
Mike Lowndes, eCommerce Architect

2. ● For digital channels, products (be they retail items or hotel rooms!) need
to be carefully described and marketed
Content’s just our product catalogue,
right? Wrong.
Content is King:
● Engaging content helps sell the product
● Accurate, well managed content drives traffic via search engines (both
web and internal): SEO/SEM
This talk will run through the content challenges faced by digital commerce,
and Travelodge’s ongoing journey

3. Context is king
• Travelodge has more than 500 hotels - over 37,000 rooms
• We need more product! Adding 200 hotels over the next few years
• Over £1 million through the Website, daily
• A combination of ‘Direct Line’ and ‘EasyJet’ approaches to eCommerce
• Been through some rough times but we’re back:
• New beds, new levels of service and of course: Travelogicals
• Our mission is to be the favourite hotel for value.

4. The hospitality industry is
different?
• Hotel chains like Travelodge operate somewhere between retail and ticket
sales
• We have products with a fixed sell-by date, and if we don’t sell it by that
date, that revenue is not recoverable
• ‘Returns’ are high volume and instant (Reservation cancels)
• Prices are very dynamic (supply and demand acts almost in realtime).
• Time is very important in revenue management: e.g. Rugby World Cup
• Like everyone else, we rely on web search mechanisms and brand
awareness for online visibility
• Travelodge brings direct retail thinking to a sector dominated by
aggregators.

5. The content challenges
1. Products
• Historically, timely control over content has been difficult to achieve
• Content may not be owned by you as a vendor, or product
descriptions may be owned by different business functions
• Web-specific content needs are different from in-store or paper
catalogue
• Content needs to map to inventory management - often this is NOT
held in the same place
• There may be several types of first and third party content e.g.
reviews and product images that need linking together
• Customers need to be able to search for products simply, getting
relevant results

6. The content challenges
2. Categories
• People search for specific products, but often begin searching the
web with simple phrases, that is product categories.
• The ecommerce solution is usually called the search landing page,
targeted at category keywords e.g. red men’s shirt.
• For Travelodge this could be ‘Hotels in Edinburgh’
There are two issues with this:
1. eCommerce systems are traditionally not good at creating or optimising
category pages for SEM
2. The required content often does not exist in a product catalogue, even
a web specific product catalogue

7. Ecommerce ‘engines’ and the web
● The web began as a publishing mechanism for hyperlinked documents
and most search engines and the software running the web itself relies
on this model, but it’s left a disjoint:
● As retailers we have moved beyond this model: we’re using the web as
an application platform, to enable transactions
● At the enterprise level, web content management systems don’t come with mature
ecommerce engines
● eCommerce platforms don’t come with mature Content management, marketing or
optimisation systems - these are rarely easy to use or flexible enough for the demands of
the business
Within eCommerce businesses the cry goes up:
‘we need an easy to use content management system!’
Content management is not website
management

8. Content management is part of the
bigger picture
The requirements summary:
● Historically, for larger organisations, easy and rapid business control
over content has been difficult to achieve
● Product content often needs to be enhanced, often from multiple first
and third party sources
● Category (landing page) content also needs to be managed, but this
content does not generally exist in product catalogues
● An answer that is becoming prevalent is to at least partly technically
decouple the content from the commerce

9. A recent example
Homebase ‘renewed its online presence’ in early 2015.
It used IBM’s WebSphere Commerce
But it also used
Coremedia’s LiveContext 2,0
to:
‘give its online marketing team an opportunity to blend promotional pages, how-
to guides and microsites with transactional pages.’
Used ecommerce agency Salmon - who are our development partner.
Source: http://www.e-commercefacts.com/news/2015/05/retailer-homebase-renews-its-online-presence/ Sep. 2015
The challenge at Travelodge is the same.
• However, the Hospitality sector, and more specifically hotel chains, have
no mature out of-the-box ecommerce platform such as the above, no
Hybris, no Magento.
• We do have hotel (i.e. inventory) management systems, but need an
ecommerce engine to talk to them. So we build our own.
• And we need to do it on a budget.

10. ● Digital is our primary channel - but the ‘back end’ systems that
manage inventory and reservations do not support easy content
management.
● For several years this was taken care of by a ‘database’ team.
The clue is in the name…
● It needed decoupling.
Content management is late to the
party
Good intentions...
● An open source solution was chosen: Drupal
● Seen as best practice in WCM without needing to buy a new
ecommerce platform
… and the road to hell
● Speed of delivery chosen over architectural best practice
● Lack of technical governance (since rectified!)
= A slow website that is slow to develop

11. Command and Control
• Too much reliance on 3rd parties
• Travelodge needed to take better control over its platform with in-house
knowledge
• Brought technical governance in-house, creating an Architecture team led
by an Enterprise Architect, plus technical leads
• Development still outsourced, but with close governance
• Here’s what we found:

12. Current Platform
Drupal-delivered
pages
- Home
- Hotel
- Press
- About Us
Content
services
(API)
payment
services
Enterprise CDN (Akamai)
- Availability
- Reservation
Drupal
Custom
modules
mySQL
Analytics &
MVP
Tag
management
Services
Data management
PHP Apps
- Search and Book
- My Travelodge
- Business Customers
shared session data
Cache
Search
Bookings
Customers
Content

13. ● Drupal is not a scalable ecommerce platform for the
enterprise.
● It’s still a great content management system!
How to simplify and scale?
● The core of the TL website is its booking engine
● But to generate traffic and sell those rooms, accurate,
search engine friendly, easily updated content is required
● Drupal can do this really well, but can’t run a highly
transactional ecommerce system
● We have a plan
● But in the meantime how are we managing what we have?
○ Hello Akamai
○ Hello Endeca

14. Akamai to the rescue

15. How can we be better?
• So how should we go about linking flexible Content to ecommerce?
• We have part of the answer already: decouple it from other systems
• Our answer is ‘Headless’ Drupal: use it for what it’s good at, but let the
ecommerce engine run free
• This is our new strategy and informs our new architecture
● However before we get to that, we had another problem to solve:
product search
○ Poor performance
○ Lack of filters and search controls
○ Little control over results
○ No merchandising / SEO / SEM
Breaking the problem up

16. Fixing search
● Main differences between the Hospitality sector and mainstream
retail: search is fundamentally location & time-based
Solution choices:
● Open Source - build our own e.g. SOLR / Elasticsearch
● SaaS - SLI systems
● Commercial Off-The-Shelf - Oracle Endeca, Funnelweb, Exalead ...
● We chose Oracle Endeca and implemented this year - full rollout on
the main booking journey right now
○ Improvements in customer confidence
○ Improvements in engagement
● Endeca still needs content!
○ Drupal feed
○ Realtime lookup of inventory and price
Endeca is deployed as an internal service, providing a
resultset which we ‘mash up’ with price & availability to
present to the customer the best products for their search.

17. Endeca-driven search

18. ● Content at the level of category:
‘Hotels in Edinburgh’ is the type of
web search we are aiming to rank
for and advertise
● Currently these pages are
managed in Drupal, and are
manually curated lists of hotels-
time consuming and primitive
● Endeca was chosen partly for its
capability in this area:
○ Our roadmap is to move all such
landing pages into Endeca (using
content feeds from Drupal)
○ Utilising the SEO / SEM and
content merchandising capabilities
of the Endeca platform
Landing page management

19. Next steps: The Next Gen.
• Travelodge is on a journey, moving towards a modern,
‘service oriented’ platform
• This will integrate the worlds of content and commerce,
without (technically) coupling them closely
• We’re choosing appropriate tools and products for each job,
‘gluing’ them together to support multiple channels and
devices
• As deployed for Endeca already, our content will become a
reusable service
• The change to the next gen. will be incremental: no more ‘Big
Bangs’
• Here’s a glimpse of the new target architecture and how
content fits in:

20. TL architecture: ‘Next Gen’
Front end
apps
Business logic - Common
controllers/models/managers
e.g. OWS client, FIS client etc
Enterprise CDN
Reservation
Payment
Drupal
Front end apps:
Search and Book
My Travelodge
Business
Public API
Service tier
e.g. Account services, content
service, customer object.
noSQL: MongoDB
content cache
sessions
3rd party/
native Apps
Tag management
Front end framework
(css/js/ base html)
Content
Management
Search engine
Content marketing
Oracle ENDECA
Ensighten:
Tracking,
Analytics &
Personalisation
‘headless’ Drupal
API
WebApps
Services
Data
PHP
PHP
Content
Booking
Customers
SQL:mySQL

21. What’s next?
Some really great stuff is on its way, so watch this space...