A peak readership of 10 000 in a single day and a 228% increase in the number of readers in the last 30 days compared with the same period last year, has seen the Tourism Update platform creak and sometimes crack.

Welcome to Tourism Update’s new platform. No change in content or layout, just in reliability and the speed with which articles download. It is now blitzvinnig (superfast)! We hope you enjoy the experience.

Tourism Update Editor, Adele Mackenzie, said while there had been some technical hiccups in the roll-out this week, these had been addressed. “We have incredible engagement with readers via the Disqus comments platform and are happy to report that this feature has been enabled again. We’ve missed the robust debates!”

She added that the editorial team – comprising senior journalist, Boitumelo Masihleho and journalist, Erin Cusack – had developed strong industry relationships and, despite this strange time in tourism, had risen to the occasion and produced compelling, often exclusive, content due to these relationships.

This is the third Now Media site that has moved over to this platform, Travel News and Freight News have seen great performance improvements from the previous platform, showing a more stable and a quicker reader experience. That has helped handle the soaring readership (excluding bot traffic, Travel News users grew to 35 000 in the last 30 days, with sessions averaging 2 minutes 35 seconds).

Johannesburg-based Burtronix did the redevelopment on a Drupal foundation, explained Publisher, Anton Marsh.

“After considering a number of platforms and developers, Burtronix and Drupal won our attention. Drupal as a platform is an enterprise-grade content management system. Burtronix had strong experience with the platform and showed strong business needs understanding,” said Marsh.