Behind Sun International’s website rebuild: Why the guest experience starts online
· The South African
Planning a stay or exploring a resort starts long before arrival. Sun International’s migration to Umbraco puts the decisions behind a major website rebuild in the spotlight, and shows why the work involves more than changing software.
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Researching a hotel, exploring a destination or checking a loyalty programme can all be part of deciding where to spend time and money.
For a hospitality business, its website connects those moments with bookings, customer service, campaigns and brand discovery.
More than an IT decision
Changing the technology behind it is therefore more than an IT decision: it concerns how people encounter the brand before they arrive.
Sun International’s move from Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) to Umbraco is a useful South African example of what that looks like in practice.
The hospitality, gaming and entertainment group operates a portfolio of hotels, resorts, casinos and leisure destinations, with its digital channels connecting customers to accommodation, destinations, loyalty programmes and hospitality experiences.
Sun International worked with Bluegrass Digital, a digital agency and Umbraco specialist, on its move from Adobe Experience Manager to Umbraco.
The migration was more than a change of content management system, which is the software used to organise and publish website content.
Sun International saw an opportunity to modernise the platform behind its multiple websites and brands, create a more flexible foundation and give its marketing team greater control over day-to-day updates.
That distinction is important. Enterprise CMS decisions are sometimes reduced to comparisons between platforms and feature lists, when the bigger question is whether the technology suits the way an organisation actually needs to operate.
Adobe Experience Manager remains an established enterprise platform, so this is not a verdict on AEM versus Umbraco. It is a case study in the questions worth asking when requirements, content operations and digital architecture change.
Rethinking the platform, not simply replacing it
One of the challenges of CMS replatforming is deciding how much of the existing environment should make the journey to the new one.
Migrating everything may seem like the least disruptive option, but it can also mean recreating existing complexity on a different technology platform.
Bluegrass Digital’s involvement with Sun International began with a technical audit. Sun International had already selected Umbraco as its preferred CMS and initial implementation work had begun, but Bluegrass was brought in to assess the platform and its technical foundations.
The agency subsequently recommended a fresh implementation intended to provide a cleaner, more stable foundation for the redesigned website and future digital ecosystem.
The work that followed involved more than development. Bluegrass worked with Sun International’s marketing team to refine the implementation approach, consolidate templates and components, define the scope and establish the technical foundations for the new solution.
There is a broader lesson here for businesses contemplating CMS modernisation. Replatforming is one of the relatively rare opportunities an organisation gets to question the assumptions built into its existing digital estate. What content structures still make sense? Which components should be reusable? Where has unnecessary complexity accumulated? And how much technical intervention should really be required to make an everyday content change?
Those questions can ultimately be more important than comparing two lists of CMS features.
Giving marketing more control
Sun International’s platform separates the tools used to manage website content from the part visitors see and use.
Umbraco Cloud supports the content management system (CMS) and backend (the systems behind the website) while Next.js powers the visitor-facing frontend, hosted on Microsoft Azure. These are separate responsibilities within the same digital platform.
Keeping information organised across several websites involves much more than updating a few pages. Sun International’s platform supports close to 2 000 content items across approximately 240 document types, covering page templates, reusable components and content blocks. Those figures indicate the variety of material that needs to be managed across a multi-brand digital estate.
There was, however, another requirement that had less to do with architecture and more to do with people.
The aim was to make everyday website updates less dependent on a developer or an internal IT team. Sun International wanted its marketing team to manage content more directly, giving the people responsible for communicating with customers greater control over the information on its websites.
That may sound like an operational detail, but it goes to the heart of enterprise CMS selection. A technologically sophisticated platform can still be a poor organisational fit if ordinary publishing requires excessive technical intervention. The reverse also holds true: giving content teams greater freedom has to be balanced against the governance, consistency and controls a large digital estate requires.
This is why choosing an enterprise CMS is increasingly about the operating model around the technology, not only the software itself.
The migration is where the risk becomes real
There is another reason CMS replatforming cannot be regarded purely as an IT exercise. Customers and search engines already depend on the digital environment being replaced.
hanging a CMS can affect URLs, metadata, internal links, integrations, analytics and important customer journeys. Search visibility built over years can be put under pressure if a migration is poorly executed.
Protecting discoverability, transactions and service continuity means identifying and testing priority URLs, metadata, internal links and integrations, with a rollback plan in place if problems arise.
It is a useful reminder of where SEO belongs in a replatforming programme. It is not simply an optimisation exercise carried out once the new website is live. Search considerations need to form part of migration planning itself.
For someone researching a Sun International hotel, accessing a member service or heading towards a booking, the website is part of the experience of the brand. They should not have to think about the technology behind it, or have their plans interrupted because that technology is changing.
For established brands with substantial digital estates, a successful migration therefore has two jobs to do at once: establish a better foundation for what comes next while protecting the value and customer journeys that already exist.
AI is changing the CMS conversation
There is now another factor complicating decisions about enterprise content platforms.
A website’s information needs to be organised and governed before automation can use it reliably. That matters as artificial intelligence enters content creation, search, personalisation and digital experience platforms. AI may look like a way to fix existing content problems, but expecting more from automated experiences makes the underlying structure more important, not less. This is a wider consideration for CMS modernisation, rather than evidence that Sun International has introduced those AI capabilities.
AI-assisted authoring, personalisation and search depend increasingly on well-modelled, governed and reusable content. Weak foundations are not necessarily corrected by automation and may instead create inconsistency at greater scale.
This makes CMS modernisation relevant to a much wider conversation about digital transformation. A content platform is no longer responsible only for publishing the next webpage. The way information is structured, managed and reused can affect how readily an organisation adapts to new digital channels and AI-assisted experiences.
It also makes “AI readiness” less about acquiring the newest AI feature and more about getting the fundamentals right.
What South African businesses can learn
There is no single enterprise CMS that will suit every organisation, and Sun International’s decision to move from AEM to Umbraco should not be read as evidence that one technology is universally better than another. Organisations have different digital estates, teams, integrations, governance requirements and commercial priorities.
The more useful lesson lies in how a CMS decision is made.
Businesses considering replatforming should understand whether their current platform still fits the complexity of their organisation, how easily marketing and content teams can operate it, and whether they are using the migration to simplify their digital estate rather than simply transferring existing complexity elsewhere.
They should also consider what cannot afford to be lost in the process. Search equity, analytics, integrations and established customer journeys all need to survive the transition, making planning and specialist implementation expertise an important part of an enterprise CMS migration.
In Sun International’s project, Bluegrass Digital’s work connected the initial technical assessment with architecture and delivery of the new implementation. That connection illustrates why CMS selection and implementation belong together: even the right software will achieve little if the rebuild reproduces the same constraints, dependencies and complexity.
Sun International’s migration is therefore interesting not because it establishes a winner in a contest between AEM and Umbraco, but because it reflects a broader shift in how organisations need to think about their digital platforms.
For businesses considering their next CMS, the question is not simply which technology to buy. It is whether the platform, architecture and way of working will help them manage the digital experience, protect what customers already rely on and adapt to what comes next. For a hospitality brand such as Sun International, that means treating the online experience as part of the welcome, not merely the technology behind it.
About Bluegrass Digital
Bluegrass Digital is an Umbraco Gold Partner with offices in Cape Town, Johannesburg and London. The team brings strategy, UX, design, development, cloud, QA and support together to build, migrate and evolve enterprise digital platforms. Find out more at bluegrassdigital.com.
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