Q Hotels
Digital, Website and UX/UI Design, Digital Transformation, Integrated and Full Service
The QHotels Collection has an impressive digital footprint, including no less than twenty individual websites. Those 20 websites in turn had generated a rather questionable 346 forms, for the digital team at Q to manage! With so much to maintain and update, as well as regular seasonal offers and promotions for everything from Christmas to Valentine’s Day, it’s really no surprise that the team were eager to consolidate their digital assets, save time and streamline content management processes, especially when it came to those all-important forms.
So, what if we could...
So how do you go from over 350 different forms to just 5, without losing key data, without significantly increasing form fields and without adding friction to the key conversion journey? In a nutshell: you use Umbraco Forms.
Knowing that a key objective for the Q team was to streamline their content management efforts, especially in relation to forms, we architected an answer that centralised forms from the very beginning. Instead of having one form for each product offering such as golf, weddings, and rooms, across every individual hotel website, instead, we created one form for each product offering, that would work across all the websites in the collection.
We did this by collecting the page URL at the point when the form is submitted, so conversions can still be tracked back and allocated to the right hotel. We used Magic Strings (a feature of Umbraco Forms) to create dynamic content that personalised the form content, to the right hotel, giving the user a tailored, relevant, and consistent online experience.
Our form functionality and efficiencies don’t end on form submission though. Key integrations work hard to improve everything from data collection and management to email nurturing and pricing updates. The aim was to control, improve and secure what happens before, during and after a form is submitted.
To secure a form submission in the first place, the websites in the QHotels Collection must work hard to build trust with the customer and encourage them to convert online.
To help support that relationship, we use two Hangfire scheduled tasks (part of the Cultiv Hangfire Umbraco package created by Sebastiaan Janssen), one which uses the TravelClick (Amadeus) service to update room prices every 24 hours, so the customer can rest assured they’re always getting the best price. And another is to update each hotel with its latest review star rating and written reviews from TripAdvisor, so customers can double check they're making an informed decision.
When they are ready to book, we then have one form, that redirects customers to the relevant third-party website, by tailoring and generating a URL per destination, to deliver a consistent and streamlined user experience that maintains the trust that’s been built so far. Not only that, but this way of working also ensures that QHotels can easily integrate with any other booking systems they may need to use in the future, as their hotel collection expands.
During the form submission, error logging is in place, sending alerts to key stakeholders if a form submission doesn’t pass successfully into Salesforce or Dotdigital, so we avoid data loss and keep databases accurate and up to date.
As anyone who’s submitted a form online knows though, especially one that passes the data into a third-party platform, there’s nothing more frustrating than waiting to hit the thank you page and know your form submission was successful.
When they are ready to book, we then have one form, that redirects customers to the relevant third-party website, by tailoring and generating a URL per destination, to deliver a consistent and streamlined user experience that maintains the trust that’s been built so far. Not only that, but this way of working also ensures that QHotels can easily integrate with any other booking systems they may need to use in the future, as their hotel collection expands.
After the form submission, a Salesforce integration comes into play. By extending the form field types in Umbraco, we’ve empowered The QHotels team to choose which form fields pass from Umbraco, into Salesforce. Keeping Salesforce data detailed, but not overwhelming. On top of that, where consent is given, leads can also be passed into DotDigital which drives the For-Email service the team at QHotels use for their email marketing, powering smart segmentation and amazing automations.
As part of this project, we re-platformed The QHotels Collection onto .Net Core, which, coupled with an updated version of the Umbraco CMS has delivered out-of-the-box performance improvements compared to their old version of Umbraco based on .NET framework. In other words, we built in efficiency from the ground up.
The old group website failed Core Web Vitals and scored just 7/100 for performance on mobile devices, now the new group website passes Core Web Vitals with flying colours. We reduced the number of forms The QHotels Collection needed to manage from 346, to just 8, and only 5 of those are in active use. Not only that, but we did it while still increasing their volume of book now clicks by 358%!
Since go live, one of Q’s flagship hotel sites has seen a 13% increase in conversion rate and a 10% increase in online enquiries, in other words, our five forms are already outperforming the 346 forms they used to have.
This infrastructure is built both for now and the future.
We chose Umbraco, Umbraco Forms, Hangfire and the Umbraco UI Builder for this project because it’s feature-rich, the license costs are affordable, it’s extensible to the point where it’s not restrictive and we could use it to create a strong foundation for the bespoke functionality we wanted to create for the team at Q, to achieve their key objective of a smarter, more flexible and easier to use content management platform.
It has the power to use headless architecture to add additional services, such as apps, POS in the hotels, staff intranet and any other digital platforms QHotels can think of all of which can be driven from the same Umbraco CMS. Watch this space…
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