Principal is a collection of top award-winning hotels located in City Centre locations; all of them being distinctive in their own individual way. There are Principal hotels in the following locations; London, Edinburgh (Charlotte Square and George Street), Manchester, York, Glasgow, Cardiff, Leeds, Oxford, Birmingham, and Liverpool. Operating successfully in the hospitality industry and providing hotels ‘Exclusively For Everyone’.
PH Hotels required a logical and seamless customer journey experience that would vastly improve performance throughout the conversion funnel leading to increased conversion rates and revenue, thereby reducing commissions paid to third party booking engines.
The booking engine they sought needed to be quick and efficient whilst simultaneously promoting their full product range across all hotels.
Direct integration with Micro's Opera property management system would serve live availability rates, promotions and images within seconds, improving the quality of information and the user experience as a whole.
The project needed to embrace the increasing demand from mobile users to transact and book while on the move. A fully adaptive mobile site was therefore crucial within this project, requiring an agile approach to development ensuring we created a simple, easy to use and intuitive hotel room booking process across all devices.
The aim was that this platform would be functionally rich whilst delivering an engaging customer experience. The site was also designed heavily with the front-end and offline collateral in mind to ensure brand consistency across all channels.
To start the process we conducted multiple workshops with the existing agency and client, to understand their current hosting environment and website structure. We also put an implementation plan into action over a few weeks to ensure the overall functionality of each application. This was a vital part of the process as many of the applications were integral to the Principal Hayley Hotels’ day to day running, including eCommerce booking engines, payment gateways and Wi-Fi entry points.
Integrating into the Opera Web Service platform, the booking engine provided a suite of functionality that directly integrated into the group’s core Opera Property Management System, Servebase PC-EFT (for online payment acceptance and authorisation) and the Immediacy Content Management System to create the complete online booking experience.
Following the project, we provided PH hotels with our Umbraco Support services to carry out website performance enhancements,
In terms of overall success, the booking engine launch was exceptional. Across all KPI’s the project has exceeded all goals and objectives with transactions up 121%, Conversion up 38%, and Revenue up 123%.