As part of its £223 million brand investment programme this year, Travelodge has today unveiled a revamped website which has been designed by its customers.
The refreshed site at www.travelodge.co.uk has been styled to complement Travelodge’s new room design, which was launched earlier this year. Aside from new aesthetics, the new site benefits from improved functionality, making it easier to read, navigate and use, enabling customers to find and book what they need quickly, whether it be online or via the company’s mobile site. Listed below is some of the added functionality on the updated website:
• Improved map functionality through the addition of V3 Maps which allows hotels, transport links and nearby attractions and points of interest to be clearly identified.
• Consistent hotel information for each of the company’s 516 hotels – including location details, parking information and maps for each hotel.
• Improved imagery of all hotel exteriors and interiors, including different room options in hotels.
• A simplified and faster booking journey, through a new site layout and improved display of information, along with address lookup from postcode and clearer flagging of any errors made during the booking journey.
• Less information on the homepage, meaning search functionality is much more prominent.
Travelodge’s website receives 1.2 million customer visits every week and sees up to 1,500 bookings made every hour at peak times. The Company pioneered the art of selling budget hotel rooms online when it became the first UK hotel chain to do so in 2001.
The new website communicates some of the latest changes to the Travelodge proposition since then, such as the company’s food and beverage offering, as well as the new bed - the Travelodge Dreamer - which is being rolled out across the company’s hotels.
Catriona Kempston, Travelodge Sales & Marketing Director said: “As part of our £223 million brand investment to grow the business, strengthen our product offering and make Travelodge the best value hotel chain in the UK, we have worked with our customers to redesign our shop window, the Travelodge website.
“Around 85% of customers book their room at travelodge.co.uk, so a key part of our brand re-launch was to perform an upgrade of our website and to involve customers in the process. Customer feedback focused on having a fast, easy booking journey with lots of great visual content, and our smart new site delivers all of this to customers’ fingertips.”
The new site also features an enhanced corporate section for business customers, following the company’s three fold growth in corporate business custom. The new features include a dashboard which allows business customers to rebook frequently used hotels and add a corporate rate to their search results.
The work has taken six months to complete and has been carried out by Travelodge’s in-house IT team, with support from specialist digital customer engagement agency Underwired.
Fast facts on Travelodge.co.uk
• Over 1.2 million visits are made to Travelodge.co.uk every week.
• www.travelodge.co.uk is one of the top five most visited travel websites in the UK.
• Travelodge first launched its website in 2001, becoming the first budget hotel company to make rooms available to buy online.