Back

TRANSPORTATION • DIGITAL SERVICES

Delivering a Live Bilingual Wayfinding Experience for a Major International Airport

A major international airport in the UAE launched a fully live indoor wayfinding experience — with real-time point-of-interest updates driven from Sitefinity and complete bilingual English/Arabic support across all devices.

Sitefinity CMS
Delivering a Live Bilingual Wayfinding Experience for a Major International Airport
THE CHALLENGE

Disconnected Wayfinding and Content Management with No Arabic Support

The airport operated an indoor wayfinding platform but it was entirely disconnected from their Sitefinity CMS. Any time a shop, gate, or point of interest changed — its name, description, or category — the update had to be managed separately in two systems. This created operational overhead, inconsistency risk, and a dependency on technical staff for routine content changes.

Location names and labels needed to stay consistent between Sitefinity and the wayfinding platform. With no synchronisation mechanism in place, discrepancies were inevitable — undermining passenger trust and the accuracy of directions.

The airport serves passengers from across the Arabic-speaking world, yet the wayfinding interface had no Arabic support. Delivering a proper RTL experience — including layout, spacing, navigation arrows, cookie banners, and the authoring environment — across both desktop and mobile required significant and careful implementation.

The wayfinding embed was also completely unusable in Safari, blocking a significant portion of mobile users from accessing navigation entirely.

THE SOLUTION

Live Sitefinity-to-Pointr Integration, Full RTL Support, and a Polished Passenger Interface

We built a two-way integration that makes Sitefinity the single source of truth for all wayfinding content. When a content editor updates a point of interest in Sitefinity — whether it's a retail store, lounge, gate, or service — the change is automatically pushed to the wayfinding platform. This eliminates double-entry, removes the risk of data drift between systems, and empowers non-technical content teams to manage the live passenger experience directly.

We handled the full initial import of all points of interest into the wayfinding platform, resolving issues in the source JSON label files along the way. A systematic review ensured location names were perfectly consistent between the two platforms before go-live, providing a clean data foundation for the integration.

We delivered a complete bilingual experience across all touchpoints — including the interactive map, search panel, store detail views, directions screen, journey tabs, cookie banner, and the Sitefinity authoring interface. RTL layout was implemented precisely: spacing, arrow directions, text alignment, and panel behaviour were all adapted and tested across desktop and mobile through multiple rounds of Arabic-specific QA.

A language selector was implemented for both desktop and mobile, allowing passengers to switch between English and Arabic seamlessly. Alongside this, a comprehensive set of UI and UX refinements were delivered — covering panel scrolling, margin corrections, directions panel layout, search panel positioning, and conditional hiding of empty description fields for locations without content.

The wayfinding experience was fully restored on Safari, where navigation had previously been completely blocked — ensuring consistent functionality across all major browsers and devices, and removing a critical barrier for a large segment of mobile passengers.

Delivering a Live Bilingual Wayfinding Experience for a Major International Airport

Facing Similar Transportation Integration Challenges?

Sitefinity's flexible architecture enables complex integrations with logistics providers, payment gateways, and government systems while maintaining security and scalability.

Schedule Consulting Call View More Case Studies