Scenic Group's Migration from Sitecore to Strapi

Unifying Scenic Group’s Digital Presence

Founded in Australia in 1986 Scenic Group operates two travel brands: Scenic Luxury Cruises & Tours at the ultra-luxury market, and Emerald Cruises & Tours at the premium end. Together, they take guests to over 100 countries across all seven continents through river cruises, ocean voyages, superyacht experiences, and handcrafted land journeys.

Both brands had grown into twelve separate regional websites, six per brand and a single language version only, all running on a legacy Sitecore CMS. Content had to be manually replicated across markets, with no language versions, no automation, and an increasingly expensive and slow publishing workflow. The platform blocked proper translation workflows, meaningful personalization, and fast campaign publishing.

The goal was to consolidate 12 sites into 2, building a platform where SEO authority, multilingual content, and regional publishing could work together without manual overhead, while significantly reducing total cost of ownership and removing dependence on a single vendor’s roadmap.

Three Challenges, One Platform

• The consolidation of twelve sites into two meant every architectural decision had consequences at scale. Thousands of pages needed to migrate across six regions without losing URL structure, SEO value, or content integrity, with automated comparison scripts as the only safety net against gaps or regressions.
• Scenic’s pricing and availability data presented a specific technical problem. Departure prices change in real time in the booking system, which ruled out a standard static-site approach. The platform needed to serve pages at CDN speeds while keeping pricing data current, without requiring a full site rebuild whenever a price changed.
• The content model had to support three fundamentally different page types simultaneously: global pages identical across all regions, hybrid pages with shared structure but localized components, and fully local market pages. That required a permission architecture granular enough to give regional editors genuine autonomy without risking any touch to global content or other markets.

Built for the Way Scenic Actually Works

Notum built the platform from scratch on Strapi v5 and Next. js v15, hosted on Azure with Front Door handling all geo-routing and caching. Twelve domains were consolidated into two, with users automatically served the correct regional content based on location.

Rather than pure static generation, we implemented Incremental Static Regeneration, serving cached pages at CDN speed while keeping a short revalidation window open for real-time pricing and availability data. A separate SSR-backed preview environment runs alongside the production environment for editors, so content teams can review unpublished changes without touching the production cache.

The content model was built around three page types: global, hybrid, and local. Regional editors work in their own workspace with permission controls that give them full autonomy over their market without access to global content or other regions.

To handle read performance at scale, we stood up dedicated read only Strapi instances for each non-primary region, keeping the primary instance stable regardless of traffic elsewhere. This architecture, one authoritative writer surrounded by fast read-only replicas, is the foundation of the Strapi Kubernetes Plugin we have since productized, bringing the self-healing, elastic scaling, and zero downtime operation of Kubernetes to enterprise Strapi projects.

For translations, we built a custom Strapi translation connector from scratch. The integration is ready to support the upcoming multilingual rollout, and owning it means the translation provider can be swapped or extended as workflows evolve.

Delivering a project of this scope required coordinating across design, SEO, analytics, infrastructure, and content teams spanning Australia, Central Europe, and North America. Notum led that coordination end-to-end, keeping releases, decisions, and technical alignment moving among all parties throughout the project. Content migration ran in six sequential batches, one per region, each validated by the local market team before the next began.

That partnership continues post-launch, with Notum providing ongoing SLA-based support for both scenic.cruises and emerald.cruises.

A Platform the Team Actually Wants to Use

• For Scenic’s content teams, the day-to-day experience of managing the platform changed completely. Editors who had been working around the limitations of a heavily customized legacy setup can now build, publish, and manage pages entirely on their own, assembling them from a library of over 50 ready-to-use components. Translations are now managed within Strapi via a dedicated connector, ready to support the upcoming multilingual rollout. Regional teams work in their own space with clear boundaries, so local content moves quickly without risking any global impact.
• The site launched fully accessible and compliant across all markets. Search engines can now properly index every regional and language version; old URLs were preserved, so no SEO value was lost during the migration; and users across all six markets land on the right content without friction.
• Both brands now share a single codebase and component library. An update to a shared component applies across Scenic and Emerald simultaneously, and the marketing team can launch campaigns without raising a development ticket.
• The SEO Health Score improved from 85 to 100, reflecting improvements in structured data, redirect integrity, and technical SEO across both brands. The Accessibility Score improved by 12 points, the result of building from the ground up to WCAG 2.1 AA rather than retrofitting. Interaction to Next Paint improved by 28%, driven by the ISR rendering strategy and Cloudinary-optimized image delivery from CDN edge nodes globally.

Built to Grow With the Business

Scenic Group is expanding the platform in several directions. Personalization for logged-in users is in development, tied to the Scenic & Emerald Rewards loyalty program integration. The platform is built to support five languages (UK English as master, US English, French, German, and neutral Spanish), with additional markets and languages activated progressively as the multilingual rollout proceeds. AI-assisted content generation inside Strapi is being explored as a future capability to help content teams with drafting, summarisation, and metadata generation. Migration of the Careers site and APAC microsite onto the same Strapi foundation is also planned.

Key Criteria for Choosing Notum

• Notum is Strapi’s first globally listed Enterprise Partner, a recognition built on a delivery of 50+ web projects across markets from the USA to Japan, with clients including AXA, Siemens, Konica Minolta, and Lokalise, and even Strapi’s own website.
• You know who you are working with. A professional, focused team that is neither a solo freelancer nor a large consultancy that requires tremendous budgets to pass the work down to subcontractors.
• Taking on only a handful of projects each year, rather than maximizing volume, means every single one of them has to succeed.
• 7+ years of experience with Strapi projects, with five open-source plugins published, a Strapi + Next.js Starter with 5,409 clones in a week, contributions to official Strapi migration scripts, and active organizers of Strapi community meetups.
• A young, ambitious team that brings genuine enthusiasm to every project, with team members who have previously worked at companies including Oracle, Kentico, Konica Minolta, and Unicorn Systems.
• Total ownership from day one. Code, migration, SEO, UX, MVP, performance, and hosting — one team responsible for all of it.
• Transparent knowledge sharing throughout the project, so your team not only understands what was built and why, but walks away with skills and experience that accelerate their career growth.
• A team of 40+ working from a single location. No internal handoffs, no coordination overhead, and one clear line of accountability. For the client, that means you know the person you are going to call if needed.

Key Criteria for Migration from Sitecore to Strapi CMS

• Scalability: Multi-Brand, Multi-Region, Multi-Language

Strapi is built to scale across multiple brands, regions, and languages from a single platform, for Scenic Group, that meant consolidating two brands and six regions into one platform, with the architecture ready to support five languages as the multilingual rollout progresses. Regional teams have full control over their own markets, while global content remains centrally governed through a structured permission model. With this migration, Scenic joined the likes of Tesco, Airbus, and IBM running Strapi in production at enterprise scale.

• Total Cost of Ownership

Sitecore’s licensing and annual maintenance costs are among the highest in the CMS market. For a group running twelve live sites, that overhead compounds fast. Strapi’s open-source Community Edition and predictable Enterprise plans offered a fundamentally different model, redirecting budget from platform maintenance into actual product development.

• Usability and Content Ownership

On Sitecore, even routine content updates required a developer ticket, a constant bottleneck for teams spread across six regions and multiple time zones. Strapi’s page builder puts that ownership back in editors’ hands, who can build pages, manage translations, and control regional workspaces without any development involvement.

• Freedom from Vendor/Hosting Lock-in and Integrations

With Strapi, you own your data, your codebase, and your hosting, with the freedom to deploy on any infrastructure you choose. For Scenic, that meant deploying on Azure on their own terms, with full control over configuration and no dependency on a vendor-managed environment. Sitecore’s model would have tied every decision to a single vendor’s release cycle. With access to 400+ plugins and open APIs, that flexibility extends to integrations as well. For Scenic, with a roadmap that includes personalization, the exploration of AI-assisted authoring, and further regional expansion, it was essential.

• Architecture and Developer Experience

Strapi generates RESTful and GraphQL APIs out of the box on a modern Node.js stack, giving development teams full freedom over frontend framework and rendering strategy. For a project coordinating teams across Australia, Central Europe, and North America simultaneously, that mattered. Sitecore remains a heavy.NET monolith that requires specialized expertise and incurs significant overhead for any team maintaining or extending it.