Developing a future-proof, seamless user experience for large hospitality group

Managing multiple sub-brands efficiently & effectively

As a large hospitality group, James’ Places own a collection of unique venues across Ribble Valley. Each venue within the group operates under their own sub brand and offers customers unique differentiators from their core competitors.

Due to the amount of locations owned and sub brands operating under James’ Places, this quickly became cumbersome and time consuming for internal teams as they were having to manage 11 separate websites.

Due to a complicated and ineffective set up, core user journey’s across the multiple sites were unclear and sometimes broken all together.

Future-proof, flexible CMS

We have worked in partnership with the team at James’ Places over the past 12 months to bring the exceptional offline customer experience online and future proof their business, including helping their internal teams to reduce admin time and operate more effectively.

Due to the amount of sub-brands operating under James’ Places, we decided the most seamless and effective website build would be a WordPress multisite. Implementing this technology means that all the websites for each venue are centralised with the ability to restrict internal teams and users to particular brands or allow users access across the entire group.

The WordPress multisite has been built with enough flexibility to allow it to grow with the business, and to adapt to any changes that may happen in the future.

James’ Places now have the ability to add new venues and sub-brands with the ability to adopt functionality from other sub-sites without having to start from scratch each time. This allows a fully featured sub-site to be created and populated in days rather than weeks.

Another core goal of the website build was creating clear and streamlined customer journeys, whether this was to book a reservation at one of the restaurants, or enquiring about a wedding venue, each sub brand needed to work harder at directing visitors to important information and drive highly-qualified leads to the sales team.

Beautiful design and subtle animation has meant this website looks the part without affecting page speed scores and a thorough in-depth digital marketing strategy, will now help James’ Places to deliver on key commercial goals such as  improving search results, driving footfall increasing time on page scores and increasing online enquiries.

Third Party Integrations

Each venue in the portfolio comes with its own specific requirements when it comes to bookings – some have rooms, some just tables, some are wedding venues and some require booking ability across all.

As a result, there is a wide range of Third party integrations required – ranging from Guestline for hotel and wedding stay bookings through to ResDiary and Cordero.

Ultimate leveraged Third Party tech in a way that still provided a seamless user experience. We ensured that the journey was as frictionless as possible even when dependent on external software providers, always putting the user first.