A key player in promoting a city ranked 5th most-visited destination in Europe in 2024, Geneva Tourism is modernising its digital infrastructure with the help of local partners. The Geneva tourist office has entrusted the agency Idéative with the development of its websites, geneve.com and pro.geneve.com, with the aim of rationalising its costs and establishing its digital sovereignty. The project is based on a multi-site, scalable and highly-available platform hosted by Infomaniak. For this technological challenge, the agency Idéative received the Meilleur du Web (Best of the Web) award (MDW24).

This project demonstrates Idéative’s ability to meet the specific needs of the public sector while focusing on local and sustainable solutions. Our partnership with Infomaniak allows us to offer our customers a high-availability, secure and environmentally-friendly infrastructure. Christophe Miville, Director & Partner – Idéative

The needs of a tourist office in one of the main Swiss cities

The Geneva tourist office turned to Idéative to design and create the new B2B website, pro.geneve.com. The existing geneve.com website, meanwhile, was based on the SiteCore proprietary content management system (CMS), hosted in Germany, which had very high operating and licensing costs, while limiting the autonomy of the teams. The objective was twofold: to be free from this expensive technology dependency and to build a local, open source, easy to maintain and sustainably scalable infrastructure. 

To meet these challenges, Idéative implemented a solution based on the TYPO3 open source CMS combined with a local cloud hosting / service solution. This new architecture pools the components of the two sites and makes it possible to manage the information of several separate websites efficiently while supporting their future expansion.

Strategic issues

The project presented several technical challenges:

  • Guaranteeing centralised multi-site management and pooling of components:  it was necessary to create a structure capable of hosting multiple websites while sharing resources effectively.
  • Developing a high-performance and optimised solution: the focus was on search engine referencing (SEO), accessibility, security and technical performance.
  • Integrating existing external tools and promoting data exchange: it was necessary to centralise the management and updating of more than 3,000 points of interest in Geneva and around 10,000 items of media content in three languages in order to offer users a powerful search engine. In particular, it was necessary to integrate third-party systems such as EfficyCRM, Google Places API, OpenAgenda and Solr to ensure the proper functioning of the site.
  • Ensuring high availability of the infrastructure: the Geneva Tourism sites must be able to absorb significant peak loads in order to guarantee a smooth user experience in all circumstances.

Choosing Infomaniak

Idéative chose Infomaniak for the following key reasons:

  1. A long-standing partnership: for more than 20 years, Idéative has relied on Infomaniak’s expertise to deploy large-scale projects requiring reliable hosting solutions.
  2. High-performance cloud solutions: Infomaniak’s cloud hosting solution offers the right performance and scalability for a project of this scale.
  3. Optimised costs: Infomaniak’s prices are competitive and make it possible to optimise project costs with a high level of quality.
  4. Data sovereignty: Infomaniak’s infrastructures are hosted in Switzerland and guarantee complete data confidentiality in accordance with local and European standards. This is a crucial point for a public player such as Geneva Tourism.
  5. CSR policy: Infomaniak and its long-standing commitment to the climate are in line with the requirements of Geneva Tourism and Idéative.

It was essential for us to have partners who share our values. Céline Briod, Director of the Digital Department – Geneva Tourism

Implementation of a cloud server for Geneva Tourism

Rapid deployment
The cloud environment was deployed in record time thanks to Infomaniak’s management tools. This allowed the DevOps teams to focus on key project features quickly.

Reliable and easy to maintain
The continued availability of the Geneva Tourism sites was a priority. Infomaniak’s cloud infrastructure is designed to guarantee a very high level of reliability, with a guaranteed uptime of 99.99%. Natively integrating TYPO3, with automatic backups and an advanced security scanner, this turnkey solution simplified maintenance and lightened the workload of Ideative’s teams.

Performance optimisation
The flexibility of the cloud server allowed Idéative to adjust resources in real time to ensure optimal performance.

Occasional technical support
Throughout the project, Infomaniak’s support team helped identify specific optimisations to improve the performance of the multi-site infrastructure implemented by Idéative.

Results and outlook

Geneva Tourism now benefits from a high-performance and cost-effective platform that is permanently available and meets not only its current but also its future needs:

  • Management of multiple sites with a single tool
  • Reduced infrastructure and licensing costs
  • High service availability and seamless navigation for visitors
  • Simplified future integrations without the need for a major overhaul

This new platform allows us to manage our websites more intuitively and efficiently. We are becoming more efficient every day, and our visitors enjoy an enhanced browsing experience. Gaël Stucki, Digital & Solution Project Manager – Geneva Tourism

Appraisal

This collaboration illustrates the strength of a local, sovereign and tailor-made approach to projects for a public sector organisation such as Geneva Tourism. By relying on a robust open source CMS, a sovereign cloud infrastructure and proven local expertise, Geneva Tourism now has a cost-effective and powerful digital platform designed for the future with improved environmental management

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