The Town House Collection is a privately owned Scottish Hotel Collection, operating four luxury hotels in Edinburgh (The Bonham, Howard, Edinburgh Residence & Channings) as well as Blythswood Square, a new 5 Star Hotel in Glasgow.
Occupancy Marketing began working with the group, regarded as one of the most Internet savvy hotel groups in the UK, in 2003. During this period, the websites have been re-developed no fewer than four occasions to maximise the online potential.
The team at Occupancy Marketing work with a dedicated Internet Marketing Manager, who has been in place since 2007 to implement initiatives. Responsibilities are shared, with the client generating the demand (packages, content & offers) and Occupancy Marketing marketing this online.
Our Service
This has included:
- Specifying and working with a design agency to restructure and redesign the hotel's website
- Optimising content of the website
- Optimising the hotel's presence in localised search results (i.e. map search results)
- Setting up and maintaining a paid search campaign
- Developing a link building strategy for the website, and giving recommendations on increasing links from relevant websites
- Online PR distribution
- Advising on social media strategies
- Website conversion analysis
- Web analytics set up and reporting
Results
In 2009 we undertook the biggest change in our approach, moving from marketing the hotels via independent domains to one group level domain. The change in direction allowed us to market packages and offers in one city (Edinburgh) without duplicating the same package on the four hotel websites (something search engines don't like).
Making the change also allowed for a greater degree of cross-selling on the website whilst making it easier to understand user interaction on the website via analytics.
The chart below shows the percentage of online bookings which now come via their own website. This is considerably higher than the European average which is in the region of 7%.
By driving more direct visitors and bookings the Town House Collection benefits from:
- Relying less on OTA's
- Higher net rates