BDL Hotels

Founded in 1997, BDL Hotels has grown to manage 45 hotels and has prospered over the past 18 months despite the economic turmoil, winning a large number of management contracts across the UK. BDL Hotels managed 26 hotel websites (plus numerous stand-alone sites) for brands such as Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn and Ramada Encore, and came to Alienation Digital for a fresh new approach to its online presence.

With regular new additions to the company’s hotel management portfolio, Alienation’s capacity to respond to change and deliver services across the online spectrum, from web design and development to digital marketing, was considered pivotal to the agency’s successful proposition.

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What was the challenge

Design and develop a group portal website to be supported by a scalable, content managed, multi-website platform for over 50 individual hotel and specialist service websites.

the challenge

Building a robust, long-term digital strategy

The size and scope of the project demanded a comprehensive approach to the digital strategy. Alienation Digital and BDL Hotels worked together to develop a strategy which would utilise the strengths of both the agency and client to build a structured and manageable project.

  1. Benchmarking Current Performance
  2. Identifying Opportunities
  3. Digital Marketing Healthcheck
  4. Planning Timescales for Execution
  5. Mapping out structure
strategy
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BDL Hotels

The main BDL Hotels website acts as BDL’s own comparison site, covering all of the hotels in its portfolio.

With advanced search technology the site allows users to search by brand, region, packages, and facilities to better refine their results. This site is the very offer-focused, customer-facing platform of the BDL group. It is the central hub for BDL Hotels, linking off to all the individual hotel websites and giving them the opportunity to up-sell.

BDL Hotels BDL Hotels

BDL Brand Sites

Measurability & Iteration

Outstanding performance is based on a continued commitment to refining, redeveloping and marketing the websites, meaning that project launch was far from the end of the story, only the beginning.

We consistently refine and track performance of customer acquisition channels, from search keywords to web referrals, and monitor user journeys across the site and booking engine to optimise conversions.

Ongoing digital marketing is targeted to the requirements of each individual hotel, drawing out recommendations to make the sites better through developments which will make the sites more social, interactive, mobile and customer focused.

Impact on BDL Hotels

  • Visits 103%
  • Unique Visitors 113%
  • New Visits 116%
  • Visited 5+ pages 170%
  • Goal Conversion Rate 33%
  • Revenue 131%

Further Developments Coming Soon

BDL Ireland

Alienation was selected on the basis of their ability to meet our fast-developing needs. As we continue on our target to grow from 45 to 60 hotels by 2013, we need a scalable hotel website management solution which is being produced by Alienation to fit our requirements.The Alienation team are responsive and helpful and understand our daily pressures. The team is energetic, happy to help and we feel Alienation is a great match for BDL as we strive to build sites which allow our guests to get to the information they need quickly and, ultimately, make bookings."

Yvonne Seator Yvonne Seator Group Marketing Manager BDL Hotels