Our first client spotlight features The Athenaeum, a Luxury Mayfair hotel with adjoining luxury residences, and one of only a few hotels fortunate to have views of Green Park, stretching beyond the trees to Buckingham Palace. The Athenaeum has a strong heritage, hosting Hollywood’s glitterati over many decades, with famous names such as Marlon Brando, Harrison Ford, Lauren Bacall, Liza Minnelli, and Elizabeth Taylor all having enjoyed the famous service and hospitality.
The hotel boasts adjoining residences, with these luxury serviced apartments available to book directly through their website. The prestige of these Mayfair residences can trace back to The Athenaeum’s famous residents, namely Steven Spielberg, who setup an editing suite within one while working on E.T, Close Encounters and Indiana Jones.
How did our relationship with The Athenaeum start?
As an agency, we have proven our credentials in boosting direct revenue for hotels by fending off online travel agents (OTA’s) from taking a slice of the profits and commission away from hotels. This was recognised by The RTL Group, operators of The Athenaeum, who requested our support.
Our agency was approached by The Athenaeum two years ago to help boost levels of engagement with their website and to increase direct booking reservations through their website. For many years now, online travel agents (OTAs) have been creating the impression that they give the best rates, which wasn’t the case after conducting our initial research into room rates through Google at The Athenaeum. The hotel now actually offers a direct booker guarantee and various benefits to customers who book direct.
How have UP supported The Athenaeum?
Our agency has worked closely with The Athenaeum on a number of optimisations over the years. Our team worked closely to support the hotel at a time when they were undertaking a rebrand and refurbishment. During this period, our designers undertook a thorough UX and UI site review , then developed a new, optimised responsive website to best reflect the brand and new and impressive interiors.
During our time collaborating, the hotel’s proposition and offering has become superior to OTA’s for any guest now looking to book, with the option available to add additional perks when booking directly which are otherwise unavailable through sites such as booking.com. To strengthen The Athenaeum’s proposition, we have worked closely with the hotel’s marketing team to optimise their website across a number of areas, with the hotel now appearing more prominently through online advertising channels and also organically.
The Athenaeum’s Luxury Mayfair Apartments (Residences)
Our approach to supporting the hotel’s marketing activity is working well, as during 2017, the Hotel saw a 7% YoY increase in website revenue, which is a significant increase based on the hotel’s annual turnover. Importantly, when attributing the revenue back to key channels, the areas showing improved commerce conversion rates were organic and paid, which was fantastic to see, with our team at UP investing a lot of time optimising these areas.
What’s next for The Athenaeum?
It’s a very exciting time right now for The Athenaeum, with their recently appointed General Manager Eva Mount in place to take the hotel forward into the next phase of growth. To keep up to date with developments you can tune into updates from the Athenaeum across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Looking to drive direct bookings and increase conversions through your website. To learn more about the work our agency can do for your business, we would love to hear from you.
