How Directus helped a global luxury travel leader unify its CMS stack

Industry: Luxury travel: tour operator & hotel operator
Headquarters: Paris, France
Revenue: €2 billion (2025)
Employees: 25,000 (HQ + resort staff)
Presence: 5 business units: Europe/Africa, Asia, Great China, North America, South America
Directus use cases: Resort mobile app, travel agent portal (CMTA), B2C websites
Timeline: POC in 2023, first deployment in production in 2024, new deployments coming in 2026

1. Background

Club Med occupies a rare position in the travel industry: the group combines two businesses that are seldom run under the same roof: tour operator and hotel operator. While most competitors delegate hotel management to third-party investors, Club Med controls the entire chain, from booking a vacation to running the resort where guests stay.

The group posted €2 billion in revenue in 2025, with tens of thousands of employees spread across resorts on four continents, organized into five business units: Europe/Africa, Asia, Great China, North America, and South America.

Club Med's direct and semi-direct sales reached 71%, with 48% of those confirmed online. That competitive advantage comes with a real constraint: the digital tools that power it need to be both reliable and agile.

The group's digital organization, called Global Marketing Digital & Technology, brings together under one roof what were historically separate functions: IT, communications, and product management. This team builds and maintains all digital assets in-house: the public-facing website, the guest mobile app, and the interfaces used by travel agent partners and in resort tools.

2. The situation before Directus

For over a decade, Club Med managed its content with internally built tools. The legacy CMS was written in Backbone.js, a framework that served the group well in its day but had become a growing liability. Finding developers with Backbone skills on the market was increasingly difficult. Every time a team member left, institutional knowledge walked out the door. And the system's technical limitations were slowing down the business teams who depended on it.

Fragmentation was the other structural problem. Club Med was running several separate CMS platforms depending on the use case: WordPress for the travel agent interface (CMTA), the Backbone CMS for the B2C site, and a separate solution for the mobile app. This spread complicated maintenance, created resource allocation headaches, and made it harder to build shared expertise across teams.

In 2023, the team searched for a replacement and found it.

3. Evaluation and decision

The technical requirements were clear from the start: a solution compatible with React or Vue.js, with native PostgreSQL connectivity (Club Med has dedicated PostgreSQL database administrators), and capable of integrating with the existing SSO.

After evaluating its pricing model, technical capabilities, and internal requirements, the team selected Directus.

4. Implementation

The rollout was phased. After a proof of concept in 2023 to validate the technical assumptions, the first two licenses went into production: the CMTA travel agent portal in spring 2024, then the mobile app in November 2024. At the start of 2026, two additional licenses were activated to cover the B2C website and its API.

Running separate instances per business use case, rather than a single shared CMS, was a deliberate choice. The idea of one unified CMS for all populations was considered, then dropped: the data structures, permission models, contribution rhythms, and user profiles are simply too different between B2C teams, travel agents, and resort communications staff. Separate instances on a common platform turned out to be the right trade-off.

5. Day-to-day impact

The benefits the team points to are primarily operational and internal. In the resorts, where staff turnover is high, Directus replaced a back-office that was harder to get up to speed with. Onboarding time matters: a tool that new team members can understand quickly, without lengthy training, is a real advantage. The guest-facing mobile app, used to prepare for and enjoy stays on-site, is fed via Directus by these local teams. In-room breakfast ordering, for example, is a feature managed entirely through the platform.

On the developer side, the features that get the most praise are flows, roles and permissions, schema flexibility, and auto-generated APIs. The ability to create saved searches and bookmarks to organize data collections is also consistently cited as a productivity win. SSO integration simplified user management across the board.

The team also noted the pace of Directus updates, roughly weekly or bi-weekly releases, as a meaningful signal. It reflects a platform that is actively developed, not one coasting on past work.

"We no longer have to reinvent the wheel every time we build a new back-office. And the MCP you've developed. That's really what we're projecting into the future."

6. What's next

The project the team is most excited about is integrating the Directus MCP (Model Context Protocol). The vision: let non-technical staff, a reception desk employee in a resort for instance, make content updates in plain language via Teams, without ever having to navigate the back-office interface.

"The person at the front desk who couldn't update the schedule because it meant finding the right field in the right sub-collection... tomorrow, they'll be in Teams and they'll say: change the yoga class to 2pm. And it's done."

This use case is not yet in production, but the Directus version with MCP support has been installed, the demos watched, and the possibilities mapped out. For resort staff in particular, it would be a fundamental shift: turning a tool that currently requires some expertise into something anyone can use.

Meanwhile, the migration of the Club Med websites to Directus, the third major project, is underway. This is the broadest scope yet: the full commercial content layer of the website, covering offers, departure cities, promotions, and editorial content across all markets and locales.

Quotations

"We rely on a product that's evolving and actively maintained; that's also what we came for, especially new features like the MCP with AI, which for us really represent the future, enabling resort teams who aren't very tech-savvy to contribute much more easily."
Lisa Le Pogam, Global Marketing, Digital & Technology, Club Med.

"Directus has dramatically simplified contributions for our internal teams: managing offers, activities, and commercial campaigns is much smoother on a daily basis."
José Cardoso, Product Owner / CMS lead, Club Med.

Summary

Club Med moved from a collection of fragmented, aging tools to a single active platform that can grow with the group's ambitions. The gains are not yet measured in revenue or cost reduction. The team is clear-eyed about that. They are in the ability to work more smoothly, to avoid rebuilding foundations with every new project, and to pursue AI-driven use cases that would have been impossible with the old architecture.