Nicolaus: catalog automation for travel and hospitality

Founded in 2003 in Ostuni, Italy, Nicolaus was initially established as one of the country’s leading Destination Management Companies (DMC). Over the years, the company evolved into a diversified group operating across multiple tourism and hospitality sectors.

Today, the Nicolaus Group encompasses three core business areas: Tour Operating, Hotel Management, and Real Estate. It manages a portfolio of resorts in Italy and the Mediterranean under the Nicolaus Club brand and promotes more than 300 carefully selected hotels, resorts, and residences across top holiday destinations.

Through strategic acquisitions, including Valtur in 2018, the group has consolidated its position as a leading brand in the Italian travel industry.

Because of its broad and dynamic offering, Nicolaus was looking for a catalog automation solution to create its holiday, tour, and resort catalogs — a key tool for presenting its destinations, experiences, and services across multiple brands.

The challenge: automating the creation of resort catalogs for multiple brands

Before adopting Pagination, Nicolaus managed the creation of its catalogs manually in Adobe InDesign. Each catalog included detailed information about dozens of resorts and hotels, exported from the company’s CMS.

The process was time-consuming and repetitive, requiring designers to manually copy and paste structured information and adjust layouts each time the content changed.

For its two main brands Nicolaus Club and Valtur, the team needed a solution that could:

• Automatically importing data from their CMS into existing InDesign templates
• Preserving the original formatting of text and descriptions exported in HTML
• Allowing design flexibility, enabling the company to update or modify layouts every year without disrupting the automation process

The solution: automated layout generation from CMS data

Pagination implemented a database publishing system that connects Nicolaus’s data exports to their InDesign templates, enabling the company to generate updated catalogs in just a few hours instead of weeks. The main features of this InDesign automation solution are: 

Data integration and content formatting

• Data is exported from Nicolaus’s CMS as a CSV file containing HTML-formatted text.
• Pagination reads and interprets HTML tags directly, preserving bold, italics, and lists exactly as they appear on the website.
• Hotel and resort star ratings, provided as numbers in the data file, are automatically converted into visual icons.

Template-driven automation and layout management

• Nicolaus provides its own InDesign templates each year, featuring double-page editorial layouts.
• Pagination integrates automation into these templates without altering the design structure.
• The system supports continuous page layout flow, automatically managing text length and spacing for each resort page.

Dynamic icons for services and amenities

• Comforts, sports, and services are represented through icons that adapt dynamically based on the data received.
• Each record triggers the correct icon set in InDesign, removing the need for manual placement.
  

Efficient and reusable workflow

• Each update only requires to upload the new data file, the rest of the process is handled automatically.
• Nicolaus can download both ready-to-edit InDesign files and print-ready PDFs, giving them full creative and operational control.

Results and benefits

Pagination’s solution enabled Nicolaus to simplify and accelerate its catalog production while maintaining full creative flexibility.

• Faster updates and reduced workload: Catalog creation now takes hours instead of weeks. Designers no longer need to manually reformat or copy-paste text, freeing up time for creative and strategic work.
• Brand consistency across multiple publications: Both Nicolaus Club and Valtur catalogs maintain the same high design standards and data accuracy, ensuring brand coherence across all communication materials.
• Scalable automation for multiple versions: Pagination’s solution allows Nicolaus to manage multiple catalog versions using the same automated InDesign templates.

Key takeaway: automation that keeps creativity at the center

By partnering with Pagination, Nicolaus transformed a complex and manual publishing workflow into a streamlined data-driven process. The company can now produce high-quality travel catalogs for both Nicolaus Club and Valtur in just a few hours, without compromising on design, flexibility, or brand identity.

Pagination continues to support Nicolaus in scaling its publishing processes, helping the group maintain consistency, accuracy, and elegance across every new edition of its catalogs.

Make your catalog creation faster, smarter, and always on brand

If you’re a tour operator, hotel chain, or travel group looking to simplify the production of your brochures or catalogs, Pagination can help.

Our catalog maker connects your data to your InDesign templates, enabling you to publish print-ready and web-ready documents in hours instead of weeks

Discover how Pagination can help your team turn complex travel data into beautifully designed catalogs.
Contact us or watch our demo to see how it works.