Building a Modern Tourism Platform for the Maltese Islands
Client: Visit Malta
Malta's tourism authority needed a digital platform that could showcase the islands to the world. We built a multilingual, high-performance tourism experience that turned casual browsers into confirmed visitors.
The Challenge
Malta competes with some of the Mediterranean's most established tourism destinations -- Greece, Croatia, southern Spain. The Malta Tourism Authority's existing digital presence was fragmented across multiple outdated microsites, with inconsistent branding, slow page loads, and no coherent journey from inspiration to booking.
The platform needed to serve visitors in multiple languages, surface thousands of events, attractions, and accommodation options, and provide a seamless experience across desktop and mobile. Search functionality was virtually non-existent, meaning users had to manually browse through paginated lists to find anything relevant. The result was high bounce rates and missed opportunities to convert interest into actual visits.
On the content management side, the tourism authority's editorial team was bottlenecked by a rigid CMS that required developer involvement for even basic content updates, creating delays of days or weeks for time-sensitive tourism campaigns.
The Solution
We designed and built a unified tourism platform on Next.js with a headless CMS back end, giving the editorial team full autonomy over content creation and publishing. The front end was deployed globally via Cloudflare, ensuring sub-two-second load times regardless of where in the world a visitor is browsing from.
Algolia-powered search was implemented across the entire platform, enabling visitors to instantly discover events, restaurants, beaches, historical sites, and accommodation filtered by date, location, category, and language. We integrated the Google Maps API to provide interactive map-based exploration, allowing users to visually browse attractions and plan itineraries.
A comprehensive internationalisation (i18n) layer supports multiple languages with content-aware routing, ensuring that visitors from key source markets -- the UK, Germany, Italy, France, and Scandinavia -- experience the platform in their native language. We also built booking integration touchpoints that connect users with partner accommodation providers and tour operators at exactly the right moment in their browsing journey.
The Results
More Engagement
Session duration up
Tourism Enquiries
Increase in leads
Load Time
Global average
Languages
Fully localised
Within the first quarter post-launch, the unified platform saw a 45% increase in average session duration as visitors engaged more deeply with interactive maps and event discovery. Tourism enquiries through the platform grew by 30%, with the booking integration touchpoints driving measurable conversions. The editorial team now publishes campaign content same-day without developer involvement, and the platform consistently loads in under two seconds across all target markets.
Technology Stack
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