With millions of visitors a year, Best Western Hotels requires an eCommerce solution without compromise. Spinbox have led the way for 5 years with improved conversions year on year. Find out how.
From legacy to the future Brief
Best Western, a global hospitality brand and household name, partnered up with Spinbox in 2014 to architect, design and develop arguably one of the largest Sitefinity websites.
Best Western required an integrated CMS platform which would communicate with a growing number of new and legacy 3rd party systems, allow back-end users to easily manage content, handle millions of visitors, book hotels through existing international systems, and bring their digital strategy in line with leading hoteliers - all with a platform and vision that will surpass competition.
With a re-brand for Best Western at the same time, reaching new audiences was key, whilst also maintaining the trusted mark of a Hotel chain that cares about it's customers.
Mobile being an area previously ignored, the website needed to allow users to search for a hotel in the UK and internationally for one of their 5000+ hotels, provide pricing and full booking engine for hotel reservations and improve conversions across the board.
Design, test, repeat Solution
Spinbox spent the time to carry out market research and becoming hospitality sector gurus allowing us to take the lead and define core requirements based on the tight business targets and objectives laid out.
The flexibility of the platform and agile approach to managing the project allowed the stories to unfold as development progressed, ensuring that all stakeholders remained updated throughout and 3rd party integrations seamlessly function together as a single workflow.
Through a combination of market trend analysis, UX research, working groups, and running A/B split testing on the user journey, we are able to identify conversion holes in the existing process. This allowed us to make design and UX decisions to continuously improve conversions within the core booking funnel.
The website not only had to look impressive, it was also important that the infrastructure it sat on was able to perform to the highest level to ensure visitors converted quickly. Continuous integration & development and an agile framework has allowed Best Western website to remain a leader and continued growth since 2015.
Gallery
Spinbox has been instrumental in driving direct bookings to Best Western Hotels Great Britain. The ideas and expertise they bring to the table have allowed us to increase of conversion rate consistently over the past 5 years.
Chris Bowling | Senior Digital Manager
Beating expectations Results
Results were seen immediately with the UI & UX and speed of the website are at an award-winning level. With Spinbox tuning Sitefinity to be super-fast out of the box with the use of advanced caching and indexing - ensuring that SEO was major factor in each step of the development.
Progress Sitefinity recognised the website for its excellence in user experience and innovation in applying Sitefinity features and capabilities. Best Western were awarded a place on the list of Sitefinity Top 5 Websites during 2015, and were winners in 2020 under a new design and structure.
Spinbox continues to work with Best Western as their primary development partner, delivering enhancements and solutions to the website to improve speed, responsiveness, accessibility, accuracy, security, and most importantly uplift conversions.
The ROI has been the true success story of Best Western, surpassing expected conversion rates for mobile and desktop. Strongly performing for 5 years and now with new marketing campaign tools delivering SEO relevant content.
Ongoing maintenance and improvements have seen a positive effect on page speed, with key landing pages such as the homepage being served over 68% faster since moving to new MVC framework.
The project roadmap ahead will bring many more exciting new digital features to Best Western, which we can’t wait to show off!