NIVAS

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Arena Hospitality Group is one of the most dynamic hospitality groups in Central and Eastern Europe currently offering a portfolio of 26 owned, co-owned, leased, and managed properties with more than 10,000 rooms and accommodation units in Croatia, Germany, and Hungary.

I'm responsible for the implementation of digital projects within the company. My current role is head of digital marketing, web, and mobile app manager.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire NIVAS, and what were your goals?

We hired Nivas to create our digital landscape, from large booking sites to specific digital presentation websites. They created a framework for our main digital booking websites from a single CMS.

In that way, it is easy to share features, updates, and maintain them. We recognized the potential of going head to head with OTAs and getting back direct bookings.

SOLUTION

How did you select NIVAS and what were the deciding factors?

When deciding on a long-term development partner we evaluated several digital agencies. The deciding factors were not just technical solutions or experience, one of the main points was fully understanding the hospitality cycles, resources, and ideas on how to implement innovative solutions with the main focus on CRO.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

The main scope of the project included the development of booking websites that are fully API Integrated with CRM/PMS. Prior to development, NIVAS conducted UX/UI/user testing in order to improve and optimize all parts of the funnel to reach our KPIs. Arenacampsites (booking channel for campsites) & Arenahotels (booking channel for hotels&resorts) are our main projects. They fully produced a booking website for our Glamping segment and corporate presentation website. All booking websites are based on their proprietary framework VUDU CMS that is optimized for hospitality with specific features that ensure we can respond to market needs on daily basis. The backend is based on PHP, the front end is a mix of VUE and HTML/CSS/JS templates.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We collaborated with 8-10 team members from Nivas, depending on the development phase, from top to the bottom.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Our KPIs have been surpassed more than x2. They meet and surpassed our expectations.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

Flexible, agile, and responsive. Available 24/7.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

They were focused and emerged into our business goals and showed an extraordinary level of understanding of the hospitality business inside out. They took hospitality trends and interpret them into our digital landscape striving to lead and not copy the game.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

They were stiff about some design/concept changes but in the end, we understand that they defended their position to achieve KPIs and deliver what was asked in the first place.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Profil Klett is an educational publishing company with a strong orientation towards digital solutions. We develop our own digital solutions and content as a part of our Education Technology Development Centre of which I am the Director.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire NIVAS, and what were your goals?

We hired Nivas on our most ambitious digital development project: IZZI digital suite.

The IZZI solution consists of an online web application (IZZI Authoring tool) that allows editors, authors and proof readers to create interactive digital publications (HTML format) that are fully responsive and accessible, along with IZZI distribution applications that control the distribution and delivery both online and via offline apps for desktop and mobile devices with an inbuilt digital rights management system (licensing) of content.

Our goal was to create a user friendly environment both for the creators and consumers of digital educational content, without compromising the quality, richness and variety of content.

SOLUTION

How did you select NIVAS and what were the deciding factors?

When deciding on our go-to company that would be our long-term development partner, we evaluated several digital agencies that we previously hired for smaller projects.

The deciding factors were not just technical knowledge, experience and dedication to joint projects, but also the quality of communication, attitude towards critical situations, project roadmap adjustments and overall creativity and enthusiasm they brought to all projects we collaborated on.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

The scope of the project includes the authoring tool, which is a web application that uses an Angular admin interface to create HTML packages of digital publications.

The publications are then either downloaded as zip packages or directly published to distribution applications for both online and offline use. The authoring tool handles not just the process of building the publications, but also handless workflow processes, asset digital rights management and quality control checks.

The backend is based on PHP and Symfony, the applications built using Ionic.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We collaborated with 10 team members from Nivas, depending on the intensity of a particular development phase. The team from Nivas included digital designers and UX/UI experts, project managers, copyrighters, frontend and backend developers as well as a DevOps engineer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The whole IZZI Digital Suite has been available for commercial use for the past year during which we licensed it to 10 different international clients. The solution is presented on the following webpage: https://izzi.digital/ and we've had extremely positive feedback from all our clients using the solution - from both them, and their end users (teachers and students). Both content and applications have

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

The project management was well organised and structured, but also flexible when necessary. We used (and still use) Slack and email for communication and ActiveCollab ticketing system.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

What we value the most about Nivas is the excellence of the work they do, combined with friendly, creative, engaged and dedicated approach to projects.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

As our project deadlines were extremely tight, the project wasn't documented during the development phase. However, after each development phase they backtracked, completed and delivered full project documentation.