SapientNitro, Rackspace and the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse (ATDW) have announced ATDW-Online, a new listings management platform which aims to connect the tourism industry by generating and disseminating valuable content for Australian travel operators and distributors locally and around the globe.

The new platform will transform the way tourism operators, government organisations, public attractions and landmarks from all Australian states and territories create and manage their online content.

The new ATDW-online platform replaces eight different legacy systems previously used by State and Territory Tourism Organisations, creating efficiencies by making it simpler to use and maintain.

By creating a listing with ATDW-Online, tourism operators receive cost and time effective online marketing that increases their digital distribution through multiple channel opportunities. ATDW-Online listings will feature on the most prominent tourism websites and mobile apps, locally and globally, offering unprecedented reach for the Australian tourism industry.

The multi-channel distribution network supports almost 40,000 listings across 10 product categories and is published by over 150 online distributors, websites and apps. The centralised database marks a technological and logistical improvement over the former platform, where each State Tourism Organisation managed their own version of ATDW.

With the introduction of the new ATDW-Online platform, advantages to the entire sector will be significant, with particular benefit to the tens of thousands of small ‘mum and dad’ travel operators with limited access to digital marketing resources.

According to Stephen Forth, SapientNitro’s Brisbane lead, “Strong digital capability is key to the Australian government’s Tourism 2020 strategy and online marketing plays a significant role in the success of our local operators in becoming or remaining competitive. We expect around 30,000 operators and over 150 tourism websites to benefit from this new content management system.”

ATDW-Online amplifies Australia tourism operators’ value proposition and reach by providing professional guidance during the listing creation process, translation services to address the Chinese market, and global reach through a rich and easy to use set of syndication options (APIs, whitelabel web-app and widgets) facilitating listings syndication across the global network of distributors according to their needs.

According to Mark Williams, CEO of ATDW, “This new upgraded platform is the result of an exhaustive program of work. The investment in both time and money ensures that Australia’s Tourism industry has access to a world leading piece of technology which will serve us well in the years to come. We are genuinely excited about what the platform is going to allow us to do and there is no doubt that the industry is going to love the fact that we have focused on making it easy.”

Rackspace is helping manage the deployment of the infrastructure and codebase, working in close collaboration with the team at SapientNitro.

“As a trusted IT advisor, we provided a solution that helps take the Australian tourism industry to another level. Given so much of this sector is about online performance, Rackspace demonstrates how our DevOps capabilities transforms the development process,” said Angus Dorney, senior director and general manager at Rackspace Australia.