Integrating Your Tourism Website with OTIS
Take advantage of updates being made by tourism partners across Oregon by integrating your website with OTIS.
Getting Started
If you aren’t sure where to start, consider your current website. Is it working for you and your audience or are you considering auditing it and redesigning?
If your website is working well for your needs, you may want to hold off integrating with OTIS. That said, Travel Oregon (and our partners!) would still greatly appreciate getting listing updates from your organization, so if you aren’t contributing listing updates to OTIS, please email OTIS@traveloregon.com and we can help streamline updates with you and your team.
If you are considering a website redesign or refresh, this is a great time to be thinking about integrating with OTIS. Though an OTIS integration can happen at any time, it usually makes sense to do the development work in tandem with other site upgrades (to maximize your development investment*).
*While using OTIS is completely free, integrating OTIS with your website will require development support and likely will have budget implications.
There is more than one way to integrate your website with OTIS. If you are using WordPress to manage content on your website, you may want to utilize Travel Oregon’s plugin to import listings. However, if you are using another content management system (CMS), you may want to connect directly to the OTIS API (or build your own custom WP plugin instead).
Regardless, we encourage you to talk with your team about an OTIS integration as early in the project as possible. If you’ve decided you are interested*, a meeting with the OTIS team at Travel Oregon is a good next step. We are happy to help answer your questions and help determine if an OTIS integration is right for you.
*Please note that while all Oregon DMOs are encouraged to use OTIS data for their website, using OTIS to power your website may not be the highest and best use of your resources. Before getting too deep into your website redesign project, please reach out to the OTIS team (OTIS@traveloregon.com) to help assist you with that decision.
I’m in! Now what?
Let’s get to planning. If you haven’t scheduled time with the OTIS team, do that first. Please send an email to OTIS@traveloregon.com to get the ball rolling. In the meantime, feel free to point your project team to resources below.
Coeur de Terre Vineyard is a good example of a tourism-related listing managed in OTIS that also appears across a multiple website, thanks to our awesome partners.
In this example, the vineyard has updated their listing with the Oregon Wine Board (OWB), which is usually in response to outreach for the Oregon Wine Touring Guide. You’ll see the vineyard also appears on the OWB website, via their Tasting Room Explorer. Because OTIS is integrated with OWB’s database, OTIS receives updates from OWB nightly. And, because this vineyard listing is stored in OTIS, the update is reflected on Travel Oregon’s website as well as Visit McMinnville and the Willamette Valley Visitors Association websites (as all three websites use OTIS to power their listings). Below are links to see the Coeur de Terre Vineyard listing across all four websites:
- OregonWine.org
- TravelOregon.com
- VisitMcMinnville.com
- WillametteValley.org (note: you’ll need to load a few pages, as they don’t use detail pages for their tasting room listings; see screenshot below)
If you’d like to give your developers a head start scoping your OTIS integration, feel free to share the following integration resources:
WordPress (WP)
If you are using WP and/or plan to use it in the future, please review the WP-OTIS plugin wiki on Github. Please note this plugin provides the foundation for your integration and will still require development support, to customize it for your website needs. To test the plugin, you will need a login to OTIS. Please email OTIS@traveloregon.com to get login credentials.
Other Content Management Systems (CMS)
If you are not planning to use WP (or prefer to develop your own integration for WP), please watch the following YouTube videos and learn how the OTIS API works. If you’re still interested in using the API directly, please email OTIS@traveloregon.com for login credentials and access to the OTIS API documentation.
Once you and your team have had a chance to familiarize yourself with OTIS, please reach out to the OTIS team at Travel Oregon to kick things off (OTIS@traveloregon.com).