Sunwing Soars to New Heights with Cloudinary

Canadian-owned, Sunwing Vacations is a fully integrated leisure trip provider, managing all the travel arrangements for airlines, hotels, excursions, and transportation to and from its many luxury resorts. Managing roughly 900K digital images and video files, including user-generated content, to engage and sell, a volume that used to lead to multiple missteps in its workflow.

As a key part of the company’s new headless approach, Cloudinary has helped Sunwing arrive at a sunnier destination by making its cross-functional visual media workflow a breeze.

ABOUT

Making Canadian Vacationers’ Dreams Come True

Established in 2002, Toronto-based Sunwing Vacations started as a family business with a vision: “Making your vacation dreams come true.” Today, Sunwing is one of Canada’s most successful travel brands, providing more all-inclusive vacation packages to the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America than across the breadth of Canada.

Sunwing offers an all-inclusive holiday experience, owning the airline that vacationers fly on to the transfer buses that ferry them between airports and hotels. Managing 30 Sunwing-owned destinations across the tropics and operating from 33 different airports across Canada, Sunwing is dedicated to delivering frictionless, unique, and memorable vacation experiences for all.

THE CHALLENGE

Transforming a ‘Very Messy Process’

Memorable trips are often inspired by viewing tantalizing images of dream vacation spots. So it’s no surprise that with all of its many resorts and destinations, Sunwing has built up a media library of roughly 900K digital assets.

But one thing kept the firm’s Marketing and E-commerce teams from being able to relax by the pool: easy handling of those digital assets.

“We actually tried three different ways of solving this,” recalls the brand’s Creative Services Manager, Lillian Ward. “Either they were great for Marketing, but not for talking to our website — or they were great at talking to our website, but not effective with Marketing’s needs.”

Sunwing’s Senior Lead Developer, Jason Heung, agrees, “There was a total disconnect between the Marketing team and the website guys. We’ve tried homegrown, we’ve tried file servers. These other platforms were very much geared towards creating a central source of truth, but we had ended up with a lot of recreation of assets, and we were constantly going back and forth asking for three different formats or different sizes, depending on where either of us wanted to display it.”

The good news: As part of a total Sunwing tech refresh, a true content delivery network (CDN) was finally put in place for managing the brand’s many digital assets. When adopting a new approach to content management with Contentful, the question arose: How could they further improve their visual media workflow?

Heung states, “We wanted content editors to be in full control and able to coordinate with the Marketing team instead of constantly having to go to us in development and saying, ‘Hey, these are assets we need on the site, please upload them here, put them on this page.’ Having a proper headless CMS really made us re-evaluate how we could finally optimize this very messy process.”

Cloudinary now sits in their new company-wide headless tech stack that includes Gatsby with Netlify as well as Contentful. As part of Sunwing’s ongoing Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, and Headless (MACH) journey, the team is also exploring possibilities to integrate Cloudinary with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. A key deliverable in building multiple visual media assets, such as animated banners, on the core sunwing.ca website. Sunwing would use Cloudinary to manage and deliver all these assets.

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

A Sunnier MACH Destination

Cloudinary now happily (and productively) sits in a new Sunwing-wide headless tech stack that includes Gatsby with Netlify as well as Contentful.

As part of its ongoing Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, and Headless (MACH) journey, the Sunwing team is also exploring possibilities to integrate Cloudinary with Sunwing’s Salesforce Marketing and Service Cloud. A key deliverable is building multiple visual media assets, such as animated banners, on the core sunwing.ca website. Sunwing would use Cloudinary to manage and deliver all these assets, and also share image collections with outside sources and partners.

Finally, Sunwing is looking to extend Cloudinary to replace CrowdRiff to store and collect “all the user-generated content (UGC) we can get our hands on” — both for internal and customer/partner use, such as travel agents.

THE RESULTS

A Seamless Visual Media Workflow

As image handling is intrinsically cross-functional, multiple teams are benefitting from the new integrated visual media workflow provided by Cloudinary.

Ward explains how Cloudinary’s plugins have benefited marketing efforts: “I oversee all the hotel images that appear on our website and what has just improved everything are the plug-ins. With our previous system, yes, we were able to edit the image and it would get saved in a local server and then the local server would talk to the cloud, but it was cumbersome.”

“But then Cloudinary said, ‘You won’t need that, here’s the plug-in,’” continues Ward. “I thought, wow, we wasted all our time with a local server and everything that we had to do for it to work for us … and here’s a tool that just drags and drops. And it’s so simple to use!”

Transformations were another big win. “The hours that are saved through the transformations tool alone are just countless,” enthuses Ward. “We have 700 hotels who all have images that need to be resized for many various platforms like social media or our website. That used to mean hours and hours of resizing work in Photoshop by our graphic designers which has now just gone — I would say at least 10 hours saved a week just in my team, but that’s also happening right across the whole group for anyone who works with images. We’re actually starting to miss Photoshop because we hardly use it any more!”

“Another thing that’s really cool is the fact that the thumbnails load up so fast: as soon as you click, they’re pretty much there. With past platforms, when we had a big photo shoot, it could take 20 minutes to load the thumbnails in a folder. Just having them show up right away saves me so much time.” —Amanda Moody, Senior Graphic Designer & Digital Asset Supervisor, Sunwing

“Overall, the Cloudinary transformations have saved us a lot of storage, bandwidth, and time,” confirms the company’s Content Product Manager, Randy Esguerra. “Being able to apply on-the-fly transformation from cropping to resizing without having to create duplicate assets has been a big hit, a major feature and time saver.”

Esguerra also calls out Cloudinary tech tools like the Adobe Connect integration, which he says makes launching new projects speedier than ever. By delivering optimized, responsive media assets within seconds, the Sunwing team is able to provide a faster load time and shorter time to market.

Last but not least, other benefits of the combination of headless content management system (CMS) and adoption of digital asset management (DAM) with Cloudinary include improved Google Core Web Vitals marks due to overall improved customer experience, Hueng points out.