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Hotel Aiken thrilled with new website and IMA award
Online bookings increased by 3x in just 30 days. Full control over website content and special offers. Finally, a solution that catered for the 67-room $90/night property.
The Challenge
Hotel Aiken is an independent 67 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 providing great economy service at an ADR of about $90 per night. In addition, the bar is a hot spot in Aiken, which brings additional week-end business. In the summer of 2008, Hotel Aiken was struggling with finding an online provider that would equip them with the a simple, yet robust solution to optimize their web presence, namely:
The Solution
GuestCentric powered Hotel Aiken with an simple and affordable solution:
Brand new hotel website design 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.
One-page booking engine
GuestCentric’s one-screen hotel booking engine decreases the reservation abandon rate by offering a simple and faster booking process. One-page means that multiple steps that confuse users and create high abandon rates are avoided. Flexible promotions allow targeted selling and reaction to demand changes, especially in low season.
Control to change offers, content and more
Hotel Aiken’s staff is now able to quickly review all new reservations, yield prices and overall manage the online channel from an internet browser. 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.
“GuestCentric really understood the challenges that independent hotels like us face and made the entire process easy for us.” said Lindsey Wise, Hotel Aiken’s Sales Coordinator.“Now we can keep the hotel’s website looking fresh by updating content at anytime from anywhere.”
The Results
Despite the economic downturn faced by the hotel industry late in 2008/early 2009, with this new approach Hotel Aiken managed to improve their online revenue instantly.
