Marston Hotels
Case Study
In 2006 the Marston Hotels website was completely overhauled with four key targets:
- Increase the number of visitors arriving at the site
- Improve the site’s % conversion rate (visitors becoming customers)
- Transfer off line sales online to benefit from lower cost of sales ratio
- Further reduce internal handling required for online sales
The 9 month long project began with a review of visitors behaviour patterns, online booking conversion rates and offline contacts that originated from the site. This information allowed the project team to identify key areas where performance could be improved by altering the layout, navigation options and streamlining purchase processes.
By the time the site was launched on 17 July it had been rebuilt from scratch with:
- Cleaner, more attractive design with more intuitive page layout
- Reorganised site structure with a ‘two click’ access to over 90% of pages
- New fully integrated third party online accommodation booking system
- New fully integrated third party online conference/meeting room booking system *
- More efficient content management system to save internal resource.
- Merging of the four separate sites for Marston; Hotels, Golf, Tennis and Recruitment
- 1000+ Fully Search Engine optimised pages
- Two new web servers to improve access speed and allow for increase in visitors
- Online purchase for Marston Gift Vouchers *
- Online purchase system for Spa beauty treatment products *
Recent stats indicate an 8% increase in conversions and with the three new online revenue streams an overall increase of 136%.
