Case Study
Creating a five-star digital platform
Barceló increases mobile traffic by 30 percent with improved customer experience.
Challenge
In the hospitality industry, online sales and customer satisfaction are paramount to remaining competitive. Barceló Hotels & Resorts wanted to accelerate its digital transformation with a new hotel distribution digital platform to boost direct sales, increase the use of cost-effective digital channels, improve customer intimacy and support its new brand strategy. The hospitality company collaborated with Accenture to launch a new digital strategy and website. Together, they aimed to drive growth in direct sales and strategic markets by transforming the digital customer experience for Barceló’s new brands.
The hospitality industry is no different from any other. Consumers’ expectations of real-time, frictionless and personalized service are rising. They expect to easily find and buy what they want—no matter what channel they choose.
What Accenture did
Barceló tapped into Accenture’s digital capabilities to design, develop and test the new Barceló website. Fjord, Accenture Interactive’s design agency, helped to develop the initial concept with a view to improving the customer experience. The team focused on making the site easy-to-use, interactive, inspirational and distinct from competitors with:
- A responsive web design for ease of use across mobile devices.
- A renewed and enhanced Microsoft Azure cloud-based technology platform to improve scalability.
- Improved integration with third-party digital channels; more than 20 different online travel agencies connect to the site through a single channel.
- An updated central reserve system to improve the website’s functionality and capabilities.
- Web design and content focused on the user experience, enabling customers to view rooms and hotel services, as well as make bookings easily.
- Enhanced personalization, multivariant testing and e-marketing capabilities to gain a better sense of the customer, what services they are interested in, and how they respond to personalized marketing and offers.
- A call center channel with Oracle RightNow customer relationship management software, back-office integration and customer chat capabilities.
- Design and implementation of different websites for Barcelo Hotel Group brands.
- Application maintenance across web/mobile and call centers.
Value delivered
With its new digital platform, Barceló Hotels is supporting its new brand strategy with increased traffic to cost-effective direct channel sales and a five-star customer experience. The channel integration is also helping to increase sales in strategic markets and improve its view of the customer.
With its new hotel distribution digital platform, Barceló is also transforming its IT landscape to reduce costs and accelerate further investment in digital capabilities. The new site and platform give Barceló a robust foundation to apply analytics to its marketing campaigns and loyalty program, as well as scale its digital presence as the company grows.
After the first year, Barceló had a:
30%
Increase in mobile traffic
45%
increase in bookings via mobile devices
43%
increase in traffic through third-party digital channels
23%
increase in number of bookings
19%
increase in incomming traffic to call centers
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