The contract to be awarded includes the technical support, hosting, further development, maintenance of operational readiness as well as the support of the visitBerlin B2C websites (visitBerlin.de, product websites) within the framework of tourism city marketing and tourism product marketing.
The bidder is not entitled to exclusivity with visitBerlin. The order is divided into the following sub-areas:
Division 1: Technology
1.1 Hosting & Systembetrieb
Provide and maintain operational readiness of all hardware and operating software. The contractor first undertakes to take stock in accordance with clause 10.1 of the EVB-IT service contract.
Provision shall be made for failover mechanisms. The playout should be improved and secured via caching mechanisms (e.g. Varnish) and reverse proxy.
Number of current host systems: 3
Number of current virtual machines: 8
Of these, a server for the Varnish systems, a server for the live system of visitberlin.de and a server for the development and staging systems as well as the pages Berlin-welcomecard.de and CityTourcard. Developments are first made available on the development side, then on test pages (stage) for acceptance and approval by the client.
The current servers are each machines with 18 cores, 128 GB of memory, and 100 GB of storage. Dedicated server usage may or may not be provided.
The costs include the physical provision of the systems, physical server maintenance and maintenance of the server software as well as SSH certificates.
IPv6 usage in the dual-stack must also be established as part of system provision. The parallel operation of IPv4 and IPv6 must therefore be guaranteed promptly with service provision.
Website views for information:
visitberlin.de 19.59 million in 2022, approx. 1.63 million per month (average)
berlin-welcomecard.de 1.99 million in 2022, approx. 0.17 million per month (on average)
citytourcard.de 79,600 in 2022, about 6,600 per month (on average)
(What: google analytics)
The hosting of the pages must be GDPR-compliant. A physical separation of hosting on different servers per page is preferred. The contractor must ensure GDPR conformity of the websites and all modules used. Alternatively, cloud solutions are possible provided that they are GDPR-compliant and the company headquarters or the data center is located in the territory of the EU or the EEA and, if an adequacy decision pursuant to Art. 45 GDPR exists, Switzerland, preferably Germany.
An availability of 99.9% must be guaranteed for the entire system. For data security, a multi-level and cross-site backup concept and disaster recovery must be provided. Once a year, a complete executable backup including documentation for restoration must be handed over to the client. Source codes are also handed over in this context in coordination with the client.
All server software must meet the requirements of the Drupal version used, be kept up-to-date throughout the contract period, and replaced if necessary.
The system takeover of the three websites (including inventory) is remunerated by a uniform, one-off lump sum.
The remuneration for the maintenance of the server software and the implementation of all necessary security updates is based on the monthly service fee.
1.2 Operational readiness, maintenance & maintenance of the Content Management System (CMS)
Maintenance, care and updating of the entire system with regard to technical development and all daily safety aspects, monitoring and, if necessary, load distribution. The results of the monitoring are to be made available to the client regularly and on request.
The head
visitBerlin.de - Berlin's official travel portal
The B2C portal provides tourist information for guests of the German capital. These include, for example, the sights, highlights in Berlin's districts, events and offers from local tourism companies and service providers. The tourism portal is an important distribution channel for the sale and brokerage of tourism products, events and hotel bookings. The online marketing of the website is carried out by the Product & Sales division.
The tourism portal is available in five languages (the portal is fully translated into English, the other three languages French, Italian and Spanish are about 70% translated). A growing proportion of the content is to be made available in plain language and sign language.
Access to the CMS is only granted to internal employees and there are different roles.
There are hourly imports of events (popula) and hotels (TOMAS reservation system). The images of the website are integrated via an image database (4AllPortal) and updated daily. In addition, it is possible to update the images yourself if necessary.
From the end of 2022, data on points of interest (POIs) will be transmitted to the visitBerlin data hub via an interface, and further data transfers will be planned successively.
Furthermore, tickets for events and tourist offers are brokered via our own ticket system or via third parties (e.g. eventim).
Website visitBerlin.de is currently operated with a "Drupal Version 9" (update to Drupal 10 expected from early 2023) distribution and is provided for acceleration by a "cache server" for delivery to the end user.
Figure Imports and exports visitberlin.de:
Product Websites berlin-welcomecard.de and citytourcard.com
The two product websites are the responsibility of the Product & Sales department and are geared towards sales. Here, the visitBerlin products Berlin WelcomeCard and CityTourCard are sold to different target groups. The contents of the website berlin-welcomecard.de are available in five languages, the contents of the website citytourcard.com in German and English.
The website of the CityTourCard is currently operated with a "Drupal Version 7" (update to Drupal 10 expected in early 2023) distribution and the website of the BerlinWelcomeCard is operated with a "Drupal Version 9" (update to Drupal 10 expected from the beginning of 2023) distribution. Both web pages are provided for acceleration by a "cache server" for delivery to the end user.
Figure exports and imports berlin-welcomecard.de:
The websites as part of a system environment currently under construction
visitBerlin will centrally bundle and manage content in technical systems, websites and apps as part of the implementation of the "D-0010/2022 - visitBerlin - Touristischer Datenhub" award. To this end, it should be possible to regularly transfer all tourist data from existing systems, including websites, by the end of 2023 (export interface).
Tourist data includes products/services (own/third-party), POIs including localization, data, media references and descriptions, accommodation and venues as a special form of POIs, events (B2C), trade fairs/incentives/conventions/meetings (B2B) [as far as public], editorial stories/topics, tours, images/media, contacts, companies incl. address data, providers/resellers, persons incl. address data, (providers / resellers: inside), visitors [categorization], topic-focused databases and evaluations.
This data is used to compile tourist objects, whereby it is relevant that the websites can also become object suppliers: Since the end of 2022, data on points of interest (POIs) have already been transmitted to the visitBerlin data hub via an interface, and further data transfers are being planned successively.
Based on this, editorial processing will then be expanded to include the resulting database independently of the channel (import interface for use within editorial backends or direct data reference). The tourist data hub is therefore also a future source of qualified content for playout in the websites. This should be taken into account in all enlargements. More precise specifications will be agreed according to the detailed conception of the project.