Global Hotel Alliance

How do you scale digital content management and distribution across 45 hotel brands without losing brand identity? 

GHA uses Ibexa DXP as the backbone for managing 80,000+ pages across 1,000 editors — with control, consistency, and flexibility built in.  

Global Hotel Alliance (GHA) is the world’s largest alliance of independent hotel brands with 45 brands and 850+ hotels across 100 countries. GHA has a unique operating model: uniting independent brands under one umbrella – the GHA DISCOVERY loyalty program. 

With over 30 million loyalty members, GHA offers: 

But with such a huge network of brands and hotels, GHA faced a complex challenge:  

• How do you deliver a unified, high-quality digital experience while giving each brand the freedom to maintain its own voice and identity?  
• And how can that same content power not just GHA DISCOVERY but also each brand’s individual platforms and channels? 

For Maksym Maltsev, Senior Director of E-Commerce Applications and Engineering at GHA, this was the core question driving their platform strategy. 

The challenge: Centralized infrastructure, individual brand freedom 

GHA were looking for:  

• A central platform for content, booking, and partner integrations 
• Flexibility for brands to manage their own pages, offers, and campaigns 
• Consistent digital experiences across web, mobile, and other platforms 

To meet these needs, GHA chose Ibexa’s Digital Experience Platform (DXP) for managing all digital content across its global network.  They decided to leverage Ibexa’s headless capabilities which allowed GHA to integrate the content in Ibexa DXP with other systems seamlessly.   

With this approach, GHA has been successful in offering content and data across multiple channels including the web and their own mobile app. 

Ibexa DXP lets our brands manage their content, ensuring quality and consistent promotion of their unique offers while staying within GHA standards

Maksym Maltsev
Senior Director of E-Commerce Applications and Engineering at GHA

 

Here’s how they’re working with it:  

Structured content organized by brand 

For organizations with a large number of content contributors, keeping everything within guidelines can be a pain. That’s where the DXP makes a huge impact for GHA.  

Today, over 1,000 editors work within the DXP. Each hotel has a “Hotel Champion” who handles local updates, while a “Brand Champion” oversees content quality.  

Each brand has its own tree structure where they are free to manage content like room descriptions, dining options, local experiences, and more. 

1,000 editors, 80,000 pages 

Generally, content made by a Brand Champion is published immediately, whereas content by Hotel Champions has to be approved. This way, GHA gives each hotel autonomy of their own styles while still keeping the same high quality across the board.  

All editors use single sign-on with Okta, ensuring role-based access so the right people see and edit the right content.  

Smarter content creation with the Page Builder 

GHA has built a robust page builder setup within the DXP, designed specifically for the needs of their marketing teams.  

It includes a library of pre-designed sections like: 

• Hero banners 
• Promotional blocks 
• Content carousels  

... all of which can be reused and customized across different campaigns. 

These sections pull live content directly from the DXP, so updates are fast and consistent across touchpoints.  

Whether it’s launching a seasonal offer or highlighting a loyalty benefit, marketers can now create polished, brand-safe landing pages with ease. 

Maksym says “Ibexa’s Page Builder addressed our marketing team’s need for flexible landing page creation. Our developers enabled this by building a library of pre-designed website sections that cover 99% of their requirements” 

Multi-channel distribution with ease 

GHA uses a number of different channels, including the main website, ghadiscovery.com, the GHA DISCOVERY Mobile App , and partner platforms. Without the right technical capabilities, this can quickly turn into a content duplication nightmare. 

Here, Ibexa DXP helps GHA push content across platforms at once without duplicating any work.  

What's more, GHA uses APIs on top of Ibexa to syndicate content and functionalities for individual brands' apps and websites.

For example, GHA enables an end-to-end booking journey of Experiences and Local Offers on brands' channels.

A dynamic search experience 

A good search experience is a major part of vacation planning. That’s why the search functionality is a core component of GHA's digital platform which relies heavily on Ibexa DXP.  

When a user searches for a location (e.g. Barcelona), Ibexa’s headless integration with Elasticsearch via GraphQL makes it easy to return matching hotels, dynamic pricing, and deals according to loyalty tier.  

Even when no exact match is found, the system suggests alternatives from other alliance members, so GHA gets one step closer to a booking.  

What’s next? 

GHA is planning an upgrade to the latest version of the Ibexa DXP. This upgrade is part of a larger ambition: to keep evolving how GHA supports its brands and partners with faster, smarter, more connected digital experiences.