Golfbreaks leverages Contentstack’s AI Accelerator for 78% faster time-to-market

Golfbreaks has been successfully leveraging Contentstack’s headless CMS for many years, using the platform to meet key goals including increasing publishing speed by 90%, reducing developer resource investment by 70%, and building websites 80% faster than they could on their previous CMS. 

With new AI tooling rapidly becoming available, Golfbreaks was brainstorming how to solve challenges in content publishing and user experience using AI, but found the team was lacking the right expertise. “We kept hitting a ceiling of creativity that was essentially driven by our lack of knowledge,” Jack Simkins, Digital Product Owner, Golfbreaks said.  “We were never able to fully understand what could be achieved by using the automation software.”

In particular, Golfbreaks wanted to leverage AI to:

Generate descriptive listings: Editors were spending too much time creating descriptions for listings on Golfbreaks customer portal, website, and mobile app, and many listings were left with gaps. While these descriptions were being created, users could not book a stay — reducing direct revenues and decreasing the effectiveness of advertiser partnerships.

Categorize listing descriptions: Categories and labels make it simpler for users to find the luxury listings they are looking for and improve the user experience, but the process of assigning categories was resource-intensive, and even when it was done, it was often inconsistent for customers as categories were assigned subjectively by human editors.

To support Golfbreaks in adopting an AI-focused strategy to meet these challenges, the team was invited to be part of Contentstack’s AI Accelerator program. Together with a team of specialists, Golfbreaks identified their most pressing roadblocks that could potentially be solved with AI. They were provided with training on AI Assistant, Brand Kit, and Automate through the all-new Contentstack Academy, after which the team was supported in building out Proofs-of-Concept that implemented AI and automation to specifically address their pain points, save them time, and help them to generate more revenue. 

“Golfbreaks previously tried to implement AI and automation in the platform, but without Contentstack’s AI Accelerator program, we couldn’t get the results we needed,” Simkins said.

With Contentstack’s support, Golfbreaks has built a custom automation that uses a URL to trigger AI to source information by crawling third-party websites of golf courses and other venues. Using this information, it then generates localized course descriptions and smaller descriptive snippets based on preset prompts. 

Behind the scenes, Brand Kit is used to set the tone and the style, so that on-brand descriptions are generated that specifically match the desired format — for example using geographical context to decide whether ‘golf buggy’ or ‘golf cart’ is the right term for a particular locale. An editor then reviews the content and makes any necessary changes before it goes online, keeping a human in the loop in an otherwise automated AI process.

“The automation our team built to create the venue description is really impressive!” Simkins said. “We actually ended up trying a French venue’s website to grab the data. The tool was able to recognise it was in a different language, translate the content first before then providing the desired on-brand content for the locale we needed it for."

Thanks to the AI Accelerator, Golfbreaks also uses AI to automatically categorize listings based on the AI-generated descriptions. This automation is built using a preset list of labels, and provides a more consistent end-user experience to the customer. Users can now find their luxury golf vacations with greater ease, filtering by categories such as whether it’s a wellness-type resort, aimed at hardcore athletes, or includes specific luxury features. 

Moving forward, Golfbreaks now has the guidance and technical know-how to implement more complex automations using GenAI, for example reducing the likelihood of AI hallucinations by setting rules for what should happen when information is unavailable.

“Knowing that the use cases can be more complex means we can think of ideas for optimization across the business,” Simkins said. “I can say ‘I’d like to optimize nested references on our location pages’, and I know that Contentstack will provide valid and relevant ideas, and that the team has actually considered what we’re trying to achieve. It’s a breath of fresh air.”

With the support of Contentstack’s AI Accelerator program, Golfbreaks has been able to leverage AI to automatically generate AI course descriptions and course categorizations. Next steps for Golfbreaks are to use AI for content variation, marketing to specific segments such as beginner golfers with targeted content that meets their needs, and to trial the use of Amazon Bedrock and Anthropic Claude for AI, to expand their relationship with Amazon. 

Key wins for Golfbreaks with Contentstack’s AI Accelerator include: 

• Decreased time-to-market: The time it takes for golf course content creation has reduced from nine hours of work to two, giving up to a day a week back to a typical marketing user. Detailed course pages now go live almost immediately, which means quicker time to revenue generation for Golfbreaks and their advertisers. 
• End-user consistency: Golfbreaks is able to build, publish and localize content in a much more streamlined and automated way, matching specific formatting and style where necessary, and providing a clear and consistent end-user experience for customers and visitors to the website, portal, or mobile app. 
• Strategic partnership: Rather than getting lost in the potential of AI and Contentstack Automate, Golfbreaks has been able to leverage a tailored AI solution that solves their specific pain points. Contentstack’s partnership has provided the technical knowledge and industry expertise so that Golfbreaks can implement, test and launch for success.