Alitalia, Italy's national airline, is one of the world's leading airlines. With a network spanning sixty countries, Alitalia transports over 25 million passengers a year. Alitalia is one of the strongest brands in the travel industry, with consistently high recognition rates in all industrialized nations.
Alitalia recognized that they could better leverage the Web channel to drive sales and strengthen their brand. A necessary first step was to perform a major upgrade of the Alitalia Web infrastructure and sites, including incorporation of application servers and Web content management. Alitalia engaged b-i to upgrade their existing Web design and infrastructure with a wide range of new features and functionality, including the following:
Product Selection - After detailed requirements analysis, b-i chose to base the new site infrastructure upon the Tridion DialogServer Web Content Management System. Tridion is an object-oriented CMS that offers a wide range of portal features and integrates tightly with Java 2 Enterprise Edition application servers.
Engineering - b-i engineered workflows that support Alitalia's specific organizational requirements. Our template engineers developed a set of dynamic page templates for the new site, all designed to accommodate multi-lingual content and mass customization for local markets. b-i software engineers integrated various Alitalia back-end systems, including legacy and client-server applications that manage on-line booking, payment processing, flight status, frequent flyer programme management, and other customer loyalty programmes. Finally, we configured the Alitalia Web content management infrastructure solution to enforce strict content control and allow only the necessary editorial autonomy.
Content Development - Our content developers produced, edited, and translated the content for the site's 2000 pages, in both English and Italian.
Creative Web Design - Our creative staff completely redesigned the look and feel of the Web site, including creating extensive new graphics content and a new, more intuitive user interface.
Support - As always, b-i provided full end-to-end support for the solution. We thoroughly documented all systems, trained Alitalia staff how to use the Web content management system, and we are providing ongoing technical support for the site.
Using the System - The new Alitalia site infrastructure contains over 2000 pages of content, delivered via ten templates. We built sufficient e-publishing automation into the solution to allow a very small (four-person), non-technical editing team to manage the entire site. Content is now translated and published in both Italian and English, using simple Web-based tools.
This web site won official recognition just a year after its launch by winning the prestigious Interactive Key Award, from the Media Key editorial group, for its effectiveness, content quality, design and technological innovation, in the "Institutional websites" category, by a jury of experts and journalists.
