Case study published in Hospitality Technology posted on 07/22/2009
The Hotel Cuatro Naciones is an independent property of 55 rooms located in the heart of La Rambla, the most visited street in Barcelona. Like many other hotels all over the world, Cuatro Naciones experienced a dramatic 50% drop in their reservations at the beginning of 2009. Aware of the changes in travelers’ preferences toward online services, the hotel had to look for online solutions to help them to overcome the economic crisis, provide exceptional services for demanding travelers, and increase their direct online booking. After an exhaustive search, the manager of the hotel found in GuestCentric Systems the solution that best fit their needs.
Hotel Cuatro Naciones adopted GuestCentric’s full-feature platform, which provided them with powerful online marketing and distribution tools. Quickly they were able to deploy a brand new hotel website design powered with an innovative booking engine, a reservation platform and direct social media integration with Twitter and Facebook.
Based on industry best practices and intensive usability tests, the new interactive website provides visitors with all of the necessary information about the property and its surroundings, while improving the visitors-to-booking ratio. By taking advantage of the multilingual website feature, the hotel expanded their target markets and now attracts visitors from Italy, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. With GuestCentric’s InstantHotel Technology, Cuatro Naciones can also take full control of their website by editing information whenever it is necessary, without the need for external programmers or designers.
Because GuestCentric’s platform is fully integrated, The Cuatro Naciones’ website is able to benefit from a best-in-class hotel booking engine that provides a truly interactive shopping experience for visitors. This innovative one-screen booking engine has an interactive calendar that displays up to 550 days of real-time availability and pricing. Due to its ease-of-use, Cuatro Naciones was able to reinvent its online offers and target more sophisticated visitors. Featuring a double security certification with security shields from VeriSign Secured and McAfee Secure, customers are ensured that all personal information submitted stays private.
Centralized reservations
In addition, the Hotel Cuatro Naciones can now simplify the management of both online and offline reservations through GuestCentric’s reservation platform, avoiding controversial issues like overbooking and double booking. The platform also simplifies guest and contacts management by creating an automated database with all the relevant information to help in the optimization of marketing campaigns.
“The analytical information provided by the dashboard helped us understand the importance of the international market for our property. The international traffic of the website accounts for 80% of the visits and more than 50% of our online reservations; after learning this information it was crucial for the hotel to simplify the searching process. That is when we decided to add another language to our website,” says Aurelio Saiz Hotel Cuatro Naciones e-commerce
The interaction with the BackOffice dashboard has helped hotel management to better understand the behavior of their online visitors, and measure the website’s success. With access to easy graphical information that was not available before, the hotel manager can now take timely actions like create and test different marketing campaigns to increase visitor flow and direct online bookings. And through the use of cost effective advertising campaigns combined with the latest trends of the market, Hotel Cuatro Naciones was able to adapt new ways to improve brand awareness and increase market share.
A boost to business
The results for the Hotel Cuatro Naciones exceeded all expectations. Within a month and a half of launching their new website and booking engine, the hotel experienced a 190% increase in their direct online reservations. And in the middle of an unfavorable economic period, within three months of deployment, online reservations alone were responsible for an increase of 180% in the overall hotel business.
Especially important for independent hoteliers, the simplicity of the integrated platform allows the hotel managers to spend more time in strategically planning and taking care of their customers rather than only managing reservations.
“The old website provided basic information about the property, so it was never part of our sales tools strategy. The first time we saw the new interactive website, we immediately saw the benefits of using it as our primarily sales tool,” says Aurelio.
