Worldhotels

The Client

Worldhotels is an exclusive group of almost 500 independent luxury hotels in 65 countries across the world. As their online marketing partner for almost 5 years, LeadGeneratorsDigital was responsible for almost all aspects of their online marketing, including natural & paid search campaigns, massive social media programmes across multiple social platforms, corporate blogging strategy and programme and monthly newsletter campaign.

The Challenge

As a result of our work our Client had already benefitted from excellent traffic volumes to the site, which was excellent news for them. However, as is so often the case, the conversion rates of this hard earned traffic from visits to enquiries and sales was extremely poor.

For this reason, we were delighted when Worldhotels approached us once again, this time with the important task of completely redesigning and rebuilding their multinational corporate website, to restructure, consolidate and rebuild all their databases and to build a professional, custom CMS & CRM that would help accommodate and manage content in 7 languages, including Japanese!

Not your everyday challenge! But the kind of challenge that we relish.

See more of the development

The New Website

As visuals and graphic communication are such important foundations for internet and web based platforms, we naturally began our work by creating a set of professional graphic concepts that both communicated the essential business proposition to the consumer and portrayed the core brand values of our Client. At all stages, we needed to pay close attention to the fact that our graphic solution also had to comprise a strong and clear navigation strategy to help reduce the time and pages required to find and book the right hotel – and enhance the user experience along the way.

Once our core graphic communication strategy was approved we were able to apply the same concept to the full range of web resources that we were tasked to produce for our Client, including the website itself; the responsive version; all their social media collateral; and their corporate blog and newsletter.

For the purposes of this case study, as we produced such a huge and diverse stock of visual material for this client, I am going to show a kaleidoscope of images and let them do all the talking for us.

Preplanning for More Successful Project Management

As is the case with most large web development projects, in order to help our Client succeed, we invested senior consultant partner time to work closely with their management team for many months. This way, we were able to define the primary business and marketing objectives of the new website and related web platforms. Based on these talks, we created a bespoke design & build specification document for them.

In our experience, investing management time in advance of commencing any design or build work lets our clients benefit from a much more effective project management process which results in stronger websites, better SEO rankings, higher conversion rates and reduced overall costs.

Design & Build Considerations

As part of taking full advantage of the trends and opportunities offered in the online environment, we developed a wide range of website enhancements designed to maximise business for Worldhotels and its affiliate hotels. This not only included the full design and layout makeover, but we also developed a range of extended functionalities for their direct consumers, for their travel agent partner and for their corporate clients.

To accommodate the increasing number of guests who plan their travel on the go, we also optimised their site for mobile use and created a bespoke mobile app for consumers.

The new website structure that we designed and built for our Client was highly user friendly, incorporating images, hotel details, multiple guest review feeds, full interactive mapping, local destination guide feeds and multiple rate options. The high focus on User Experience helped generate more hotel bookings from existing and future traffic.

Furthermore, to enable Worldhotels to present the brand and its hotels in the best possible way, we created multiple CMS opportunities that enabled both our Client and each of the partner hotels to create and upload stronger and more expressive imagery and hotel descriptions on multiple pages across the site, in a much more integrated manner.

And lastly, as the project was so complex, we were tasked with building a CMS that would enable our Client to manage and control the content across the desktop and the mobile versions of the site and manage the content in 7 different languages, including Japanese.

Telling the Story of the Brand

While the front-end and back office functionalities of the new site were vital for improving sales volumes and profits, we were also tasked with rewriting the copy for the entire website to augment this success even further.

As the marketing communications strategy for the brand was based so prominently on telling the story of each of its luxury partner hotels, we focussed the reader on each of these great hotels and the superb city experiences that they offer.

Our team of professional editors and copywriters was able to commence their massive task of writing and crafting over 700 pages of superb content for the site and hundreds more pages of blog content, newsletter copy and social media content.

Building & Consolidating Bespoke Databases

As the previous versions of the site incorporated outdated databases, the management of the site was extremely confusing, inefficient and time consuming.

As this was the heart and soul of the entire project, we were also tasked with rebuilding a fully integrated database that would be able to handle all elements of data and content required in a simple and straightforward manner.

The Results: Exceeding Expectations

After working on such a large project for such a long time, it was extremely rewarding – both for us and for our Client – to be able to report on such amazing results.

“Since the launch of the new website, reservations via worldhotels.com has increased by 64 percent.”
Worldhotels Press Release to PR Newswire

“We are making great progress in strengthening direct booking channels and building a loyal customer base for our hotels and we are very pleased with how the site has been performing since the revamp.”
Robert Hornman, Managing Director Worldhotels

“Another success story was our website worldhotels.com as well as our very own booking engine, Resmaster: both have proven to be great resources to increase our direct bookings and make us less dependent on third parties.”
Paulo Salvador, Vice President Sales & Marketing, Worldhotels

Looking to Design & Build a Profitable Website?

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