This client spotlight features the five star Grove Hotel, Golf resort and Spa. As one of Hertfordshire’s finest and most luxurious hotel’s, their facilities not only prove to be top choice for those looking for a quick escape from London city life. The Grove also attracts an array of international guests, with visitors frequenting the 300 acre estate from across the world.
Their key unique selling points are the hotel’s location (just 20 minutes from London), the championship standard golf course, outstanding F&B facilities and luxurious rooms.
The hotel attracts celebrities, sports professionals and politicians from far and wide. One of the most prestigious visitors in recent years was President Obama, who used the golf and the conference room facilities for his meet with David Cameron.
*The former President and former Prime Minister enjoying The Grove’s golf course
How did UP start working with The Grove Hotel & Spa?
The Ralph Trustees Limited (RTL) group started working with our team at UP back in 2016 with a brief to maximise exposure of The Grove across key digital channels. Their key challenge was to increase direct revenue, as most of their sales were being generated through online travel agents such as Booking.com, Expedia etc.
UP’s task wasn’t just to redesign and redevelop a website, but to review the website content and for our team at UP to use our digital marketing capabilities to boost awareness of the hotel, drive the number of direct bookings and subsequent hikes in revenue.
Developing The Grove’s website
Although the Grove Hotel & Spa is situated on a beautiful estate with outstanding facilities, their estate was never truly showcased for maximum effect through their website, as captioned from the long distance view of the property from the 2016 version of their website.
The other challenges presented on the website were usability related, with a need to improve the user flow through the website and overall experience (UX). The top navigation drop downs were crowded, offering little context (especially upon clicking on rooms) as to what the differences between the rooms were.
One of the key challenges for many hotels is to stop users of their site from jumping back to an OTA’s website to make a booking and to make users stick on the site to make the booking there and then. This was no different for The Grove, where the lack of signals around the benefits of booking direct were clear.
The Grove website today
The UP team have recently launched a new website for The Grove, which the client and our team are delighted about.
From project initiation phase, research was conducted by the team at UP to determine the value of content using tools such as Google Analytics and Hotjar to take a statistical and methodological approach towards restructuring the website. Both The Grove and UP continued to liaise closely with each other to gain additional, essential insights which supported any justifications for changing the structure, layout and design of the website
The result of all of this work is the site you see today, which works hard to showcase the beauty of the estate grounds and the property itself through the homepage video. The images appearing over each area (stay, dine, spa etc) also help users to visualise where they will be staying.
We have started to see some great results in terms of website engagement since launching the website recently.
The impact of our work with The Grove
The Grove approached UP with a need to reform their positioning and showcase their brand across all essential channels, from organic (SEO) and paid ads (PPC, Facebook Ads inclusive of remarketing ) to appearing above the online travel agents (OTAs) in Google Meta search. This also included the recent redesign of the website.
Some of the key statistics from UP and The Grove Hotel working together have been:
28.27% boost in transactions over first 3 months after launch (year-on-year)
22.53% boost in revenue over first 3 months after launch (year-on-year)
23.5% boost in traffic over first 3 months after launch (year-on-year)
We are delighted to have influenced The Grove’s growth over the past three years. The work we have all achieved during this time has not only boosted awareness and the reputability of their brand, but has also been effective in driving the message home to those looking to stay that there are clear benefits to booking direct. This messaging and the digital marketing support provided by UP has had clear benefits in the hotel’s growth and ROI which we are delighted to have had an impact upon.
Interested in boosting direct revenue? We work with hotels, villas and guesthouses across Europe, America and the Middle East. To discover how much you can save on paying commission to online travel agents, use our OTA calculator.
