Hotel Aiken is an independent 64 room hotel located in the heart of South Carolina’s historic town Aiken. Described by many as Aiken’s own “Grand Hotel”, the hotel caters for both leisure and business travelers. Hotel Aiken was struggling with finding an online provider that would equip them with the finest solutions to optimize their web presence; The Property was contacted by GuestCentric Systems and presented an integrated solution to improve their online presence and distribution.
GuestCentric integrated platform provides small independent hotels with powerful online marketing and distribution tools to drive more bookings using the Internet channel, at affordable prices.
GuestCentric powered Hotel Aiken with a brand new website that provides all the necessary information to the visitors plus it transmits the “look & feel” of the hotel. With GuestCentric’s unique InstantHotel Technology, Hotel Aiken can finally take control of their own website, update and edit information whenever is needed, forgetting about external programmers or designers. GuestCentric platform creates an attractive property display using the industry best practices and intensive usability test, providing the visitors with a unique experience.
With GuestCentric integrated platform Hotel Aiken can now offer the rich online and offline experience that the new traveler demands, while providing them with the best-in-class online booking engine. The new Hotel Aiken website offers visitors a fluid shopping experience with a calendar overview that shows up to 550 days of real-time room availability and pricing information, visitors are guaranteed to find the best available rates when booking online. GuestCentric’s one-screen booking engine decreases the reservation abandon rate by offering a simple and faster booking process.
Hotel Aiken was also provided with a full featured reservations platform that simplifies the management of the online and offline reservations and maximizes revenue.
With the powerful promotions feature, Hotel Aiken could finally start to rethink and reinvent their offer. The promotions feature allows the Hotel to create special offers with yielding restrictions like maximum/minimum stay, advance booking, sell limit and specific dates.
Finally with GuestCentric’s online resource center, hotel Aiken learned about easy and inexpensive ways to improve online visibility. Also the property has now a customer data base that saves relevant information and recognizes the most valuable guests.
Despite the economic downturn faced by the hotel industry, with this new approach Hotel Aiken managed to improve their online revenue. Within two weeks of the introduction of their booking engine, their online bookings increased by 200%. Within 30 days and with GuestCentric guidance, Hotel Aiken was able to create a very successful online marketing campaign that increased the number of visitors to their website by 560% and to rank first in Google organic search.
Lindsey Wise, Hotel Aiken’s Sales Coordinator is now able to quickly review all new reservations, yield prices and overall manage the online channel from her internet browser. “GuestCentric really understood the challenges that independent hotels like us face and made the entire process easy for us. Now we can keep the hotel’s website looking fresh by updating content at anytime from anywhere.” said Lindsey.
Hotel Aiken is now also able to expand their offer with the promotions feature channels 20% of their reservations.
 |