Elite Hotels launches new digital e-commerce and customer club

Press release

Elite Hotels chooses the Nova Group's digital agency Epinova to create the hotel chain's new digital experience. The work includes building a new web solution to improve the user experience throughout the customer journey for both leisure and business travelers.

Elite Hotels' new website with booking flow

Epinova checkin at Elite hotels

Epinova won the assignment after a pitch with three other digital agencies. Elite Hotels of Sweden is Sweden's largest family-owned hotel chain. Epinova creates and develops digital customer experiences with Optimizely as its platform. Nova is one of the Nordic region's leading digital agency groups with 600 employees at 14 agencies in Sweden and Norway.

"We started the work with an evaluation of which platform we would use for the new digital solution. We primarily started from a user perspective, marketing perspective, security perspective and usability. When we were done, we quickly realized that Optimizely is the digital platform that suits us best. We then met with a number of agencies and chose Epinova based on our own experiences and the recommendations we received from various industry experts, says Tomas Bäcklund, Marketing Manager, Elite Hotels of Sweden.

Everyone should be a guest of honour

The new website is developed based on Elite Hotels' vision of delivering Sweden's best hotel experience, where every guest should feel like a guest of honor. The goal is for them to get the feeling of cozy service on their first visit to the website. The web should also meet their wishes, which look completely different for private individuals, who often want inspiration for new experiences, and for business travellers, who often want to get to their meeting as quickly as possible. eat and then sleep.

The entire Elite Hotels is built around the founder Bicky Chakraborty's core values of offering a high level of service. Service at our fingertips is in our DNA, it's our heritage and what we believe in. One of the goals of our new digital customer experience is that it should be reflected already when guests book their stay.

Tomas Bäcklund, Marketing Manager, Elite Hotels of Sweden

In addition, we use all forms of digitization to shift resources from administration to further strengthen service and increase interaction with our guests.

The work began with developing their own interfaces to handle different parts such as the booking flow and the customer club. This results in a more consistent user experience for customers and better opportunities to optimize the customer journey. The new solution is built on Epinova's framework with the latest version of Optimizely.

Conversion has increased between 10 and 30 percent

Our mission is to ensure that the digital customer journey is as smooth as possible. Already when guests book their stays, the new website will give the feeling of being at Elite Hotels.

Linus Ekström, CEO and Account Manager at Epinova

The new business critical web solution has resulted in major performance improvements and a
Conversion increase of between 10 and 30 percent depending on which days you compare with. So far, this is the biggest difference among the key performance indicators (KPIs) that Elite Hotels measures. The increase is also driven by the Nova Group's SEO agency Pineberry, who have attracted the right target groups to Elite Hotels' new website. The collaboration between the two Nova agencies is an important part of the group's long-term strategy to work together on more assignments. It has also contributed to the search engine optimization working well during the transformation to the new website.

Five companies in Sweden

In addition to the new strategy initiative and the parent company Nova Consulting Group AB, the agency group in Sweden consists of five different companies:

Epinova. Specialists in web and e-commerce solutions as well as digital customer experiences with Optimizely (formerly Episerver) as a platform.
Singular Studios. A strategic branding and design agency with services in brand strategy, brand design and brand communication.
Pineberry. One of Sweden's leading agencies in digital data-driven marketing with a focus on SEO, SEM and advertising on platforms such as Google, Meta, Amazon, Tiktok and Youtube.
Cloud Nine. A leading Swedish digital agency that creates, designs and develops e-commerce platforms.
Infunnel. One of Sweden's leading specialist agencies in marketing automation, CRM, digital leads and digitization of the customer journey.

Nova's customers in Sweden include Elite Hotels, Forex, TV4, SEB, Granngården,
Fastighetsbyrån, Postnord, Permobil, Volkswagen, Sony Music, Houdini Sportswear, Bemz, Doktor.se, Cylinda, Visma, Efva Attling, Filmstaden, Dermosil and Telia.

Facts about Elite Hotels of Sweden

Elite Hotels of Sweden is Sweden's largest family-owned hotel business with hotels in 26 locations in Sweden. In November 2022, Ad Astra by Elite opened, and the latest addition, Hotel Mårtensson, became part of Elite Hotels in January 2024. Additional hotels are being built in Kiruna with opening in 2024. The group also includes Vana Spa with its associated Rooftop by Vana, as well as the restaurant chain Paolo's and Sweden's leading gastropub chain, The Bishops Arms. For more information, see Elite hotels

Facts about Nova Consulting Group

Nova Consulting Group is a Nordic integrated agency group with a service offering ranging from strategic brand development and experience design for the development of digital services, e-commerce, CRM, marketing automation and SEO/SEM. The Swedish operations consist of six specialized companies that together form a complete service offering. In total, the Nova Group has approximately 600 employees in 13 companies, of which 170 are in Sweden.

For more information, please contact:

Tomas Bäcklund, Marketing Manager, Elite Hotels of Sweden, 073-739 70 05, tomas.backlund@elite.se
Linus Ekström, CEO and founder, Epinova, 076-429 84 68, linus.ekstrom@epinova.se
Annika Jansson, Marketing Manager, Epinova, 070-140 70 55 annika.jansson@epinova.se
Michael Jäderlind, CEO, Nova Consulting Group in Sweden, 070-849 21 19, michael.jaderlind@novacg.se
Christer Lidman, 070-580 23 03, christer.lidman@starshipcom.se

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