The Background
Best Western Great Britain is part of Best Western International, the world’s largest hotel chain with 280 individual hotels in the UK, and over 4,000 hotels in 80 countries worldwide. Best Western is the most distinctive brand in the industry, dedicated to providing excellent standards of care and a unique environment that makes every stay a real pleasure.
The Challenge
When Best Western approached us to undertake a redesign of the UK website the objectives were; to achieve an increased overall market share, enhance perception of the Best Western brand, improve their customer relationship marketing opportunities with both existing and new guests and improve the functionality of the site to offer added value to customer. We couldn’t wait to get started.
The Response
Following a detailed consultation exercise we focused on a customer-centric ‘user journey’ through the site. Meticulous attention was paid to the information architecture of the site in the design stage and the inclusion of features to ensure that content presented is relevant to the needs of each visitor. The site was designed to provide a positive user experience, be highly usable, navigable and conducive towards converting visitors into customers.
Business users are clearly distinguished from leisure travellers; families’ needs are recognised and catered for without intruding upon the preferences of singles. The ‘my details’ section maintains a personal record for use in developing an excellent CRM programme and provides a secure, restricted area for users to log personal details. It also allows them to keep a resume of hotels that they have stayed at for their future reference.
Google maps were integrated to enable easy search for hotels by region and city. Users are also able to link their stay to an event or attraction, for example, by using the key word ‘Grand National’ the search will return all hotels within the Aintree area for that specific Saturday in April. This is complimented by the information rich descriptions of the hotels themselves. Iconography, tabs and colour-coded pages are used to indicate facilities each hotel offers relevant to the users’ needs; be it golf breaks, coastal retreats or health and beauty spas. The advanced search and availability of information is so extensive that a user is able to find hotels in an area offering anything from Reiki to Michelin accredited food. A further search can be undertaken to determine if there is a nursery service within a two-mile radius, again all presented via the redesigned Best Western interface. We also implemented, Site Manager, an intuitive content management system which allows the individual hotels to manage and update their own websites.
About 8.6m people in the UK - some 14% of the population – are registered disabled [Disability Rights Commission], The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) specifies that all websites must be accessible to everyone. We designed and built the redeveloped site to adhere to the accessibility standards as outlined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Not only is the site accessible to as wide a potential market as possible, the high standards of our coding ensures that it is of optimal quality for ranking by Search Engines, another critical consideration for reaching a large consumer audience.
The Result
Joanne Burman, Head of eCommerce and Distribution for Best Western Hotels GB had this to say, “After reassessing our objectives at the beginning of last year, we had resolved to improve and modernise our online offering. We identified the need to showcase, in detail, all our hotels and the unique features available at each one. More importantly however, we really wanted to ‘get inside the heads’ of our customers and provide them with a site that allowed them ease of use, coupled with the free availability of information. We feel the new site has achieved this.
With the development of Web technologies, ’setting data free’ and making it available in a plethora of formats, it allows the user to decide how and when they want that information. We feel that the interface and features that Technophobia have developed for us, allows for an advanced, more interactive user experience that can only be of benefit both to the customer and to us as the brand owner. ”
In the first six months following the site launch on December 18th 2006, online sales increased by 58% and conversion rates are up from 3% to 5%!