Elite Hotels takes the customer journey to new heights
The hotel chain has made a journey from innovative student accommodation to prestigious hotel destinations. Now the web is also a part of the best overall customer experience!
From dorm rooms to historic hotels
Elite Hotels of Sweden started in the 1950s at the Stockholm Student Union. The innovative idea was to rent out empty student housing as temporary hotel rooms during the summer months. The business was run as a foundation, but with the opening of the historic Savoy Hotel in Malmö, a limited company was formed where the business concept was to acquire historic city hotels and inns and with financial insights and a gentle hand transform them into successful and profitable hotels.
Today, Elite Hotels is one of Sweden's largest and most respected hotel chains, with over 40 hotels all around Sweden. Elite Hotels combines classic style with modern trends and they want to give their guests the absolute best overall experience with a sense of tradition, quality and flair.
Much more than just a hotel chain
Propelled by changed travel habits caused by the Corona pandemic, Elite is much more than just a hotel chain. With a selection of SPAs, destination hotels such as
Ad Astra with an Italian influence and The Wood Hotel in northern Sweden which is a unique 20 floor building made in wood. The Elite group also contains the Bishops Arms chain with 39 gastropubs all over Sweden. With this broad selection of facilities Elite Hotels strive to become much more of an destination experience, more than just a place to sleep.
The background and the challenge
Despite the fact that Elite Hotels had a functioning website in itself, there were many other challenges in the ecosystem around the web. Bookings were created in an external system, which limited the possibilities of being able to track, optimize and further develop the entire customer journey. The solution also had a large technical debt, which made it difficult for editors to work with and costly to maintain.
A seamless user experience – for both customers and editors
Elite Hotels wanted help with...
- Take full control of your booking flow to gain insights and improve every step of the customer journey
- Improve the user experience throughout the booking flow
- Create and offer hotel packages in a smooth and transparent way
- Increase booking rates and maximize upsell opportunities
- Simplify for editors
Both users and SEO in focus
By integrating membership systems and booking systems, Elite Hotels now has a website that enables visitors to easily search for available rooms, see available dates, offers and packages, and get prices in real time - all in a cohesive and simple user experience.
With the help of SEO-optimized pages and remarketing, i.e. the opportunity to reach visitors who have visited the website and shown interest, Elite Hotels' new website manages to drive more traffic compared to before. By gaining insights, statistics and analyzing real-time data, Elite Hotels of Sweden can now lift their customer journey to a whole new level!
Explore Elite Hotel's new website
Together with Elite Hotels, we have created a brand new website based on Optimizely DXP and Epinova's framework. The solution gives editors a lot of freedom and flexibility to create and design pages without developer support.
Elite hotels websiteIt has been a fantastically fun and successful project. The collaboration with Epinova and Pineberry has worked really well. The fact that we have worked as a tight team together on site at Epinova has been a success factor. I am extremely proud of the results we have achieved and the launch of the new website!
Daniel Gineman, Head of Digital Elite Hotels of Sweden
We are incredibly proud that Elite Hotels has given us the confidence to build the new website and together with our sister company Pineberry, we have together with the customer launched a brand new modern website where all KPIs point upwards!
says a proud Linus Ekström, CEO of Epinova