With over 700 hotels in the UK and more opening overseas, premierinn.com is a travel destination in itself, taking over £1Bn of bookings every year and a top 10 organic search result for most UK locations.
Throughout 15 years and an eightfold growth of their business, VML was been Premier Inn's digital agencyDuring that period, Lisa gained an intimate understanding of Whitbread & Premier Inn, which has led to a transformation taking online bookings from 3% to over 90% of all bookings. Lisa has been instrumental in Whitbread’s industry leading usage of digital to drive their brands’ phenomenal growth. The strategy was to focus on content, to drive traffic and create more reasons for visitors to return regularly, and conversion, to drive revenue growth and occupancy rates, resulting in wide recognition as the leading multichannel travel website.
In a website rich with content, it was important that the availability search and booking process was fine tuned to continuously improve conversion. To this end, VML used deep analytics, user research and an ongoing programme of multivariate testing to finesse the experience, each optimisation contributing huge conversion uplifts at this scale. For example, a small selection of enhancements to the mobile experience drove £7M in annualised uplift.
Underpinning it all, was a platform approach to marketing technology enables a joined up experience for customers across web, mobile, apps, email and even when at the hotel with digital check in. By making the platform the focal point not just for the Premier Inn website, but for all of Whitbread’s businesses and communications, we developed an extensible system, able to grow and change seamlessly with the business.
This is a platform designed for today’s needs with one eye firmly on the future. It allows for new services and products to be easily introduced and enables rapid international expansion of the business with high reusability of the core platform leading to large cost savings.
