The Glenroyal based in Maynooth, Co. Kildare offers excellent value accommodation, superb facilities in their newly refurbished 4-star hotel. Located just minutes’ walk from Maynooth Town & University and twenty minutes from Dublin, they began their partnership with Core Optimisation in January 2019. Due to the nature of their location/demographic, they have always attracted a corporate clientele, however, with the new investment, there are now opportunities to attract and develop new business for one of County Kildare’s most accessible hotels.

TO BEGIN

The Glenroyal Hotel began its partnership with Core Optimisation in January 2019. Our collaborative goal was to generate higher levels of occupancy and increase revenue through digital channels alongside growing their online presence.

When we asked Ted Robinson, General Manager of The Glenroyal Hotel, why they chose Core Optimisation he said…

“I have worked closely with Core over the last 6 months and I can highly recommend them to any other hotels. They have worked with us to develop and improve our Book Direct Strategy. The service they provide is outstanding and has brought a positive impact to our business. Our Revenue has increased significantly since beginning our journey with them. Caroline, David, Denise and the team have always been helpful and a pleasure to work with.”

THE APPROACH

The main objective of The Glenroyal Hotel was to grow the direct business through a range of online channels. Our aim was to do so by increasing leisure and family business while capitalizing on their current corporate base. We began our work by conducting an in-depth audit of current performance. Once we had completed our analysis we could begin to work towards growing their online presence by understanding each of the digital channels and devices accessible to their audience.

From this audit, we could see the gaps that we could explore to increase revenue in the US, UK and Domestic markets. The main objectives for this campaign were to increase bedroom revenue to drive brand awareness, customer ownership and to target new business.

Additionally, to this, we underwent a gap analysis on current performance as well as having restructured and refined all paid search campaigns to reach new customers and target markets where conversion would be higher.

DEVISING A STRATEGY

We needed to decide what online methods were going to be the most appropriate and cost-effective when reaching out to potential customers for The Glenroyal Hotel. The strategy we developed focused on attracting the right type of customer for the hotel through a number of online methods:

-> TARGETED PAID SEARCH ADVERTISING

This involved audience segmentation which is the process of dividing people into subgroups based upon defined criterion such as media use, demographics and so on.

-> CONVERSION MANAGEMENT

This meant using a range of online tools to assist us with development changes on both the website and booking engine. Additionally, we built a relationship with the hotel to ensure we are maximising conversions.

-> SOCIAL ADVERTISING

We began leveraging social media advertising to increase brand awareness and using re-marketing strategies to promote booking with customers who have previously considered booking.

Through our organic work, we identified a number of opportunities and key areas where page content could be expanded or new content created within The Glenroyal site to attract potential customers to pages, increase brand awareness and position the hotel as the perfect destination for leisure or business.

We also worked closely with the revenue manager to ensure that we saw an increase in conversion through their own internal booking engine, leveraging the additional traffic for higher occupancy and revenue.

Finally, we used heat-map software alongside data analytics to aid The Glenroyal with making minor changes to their site to improve customer experience thus having a positive effect on conversion rates.