Ramada Jarvis | Web design, development & marketing

Portfolio_ Travel & Leisure_

The new, streamlined Ramada Jarvis homepage.

Interactive map that allows customers to select regions or individual hotels

Hotel homepage, optimised over 3 rounds of live usability testing.

Different product offerings have been created to suit each customer segment.

Understanding Ramada Jarvis' customer nets a fortune

Of all our clients, Ramada Jarvis set us the biggest, most exciting and comprehensive challenge; take ownership of all their online channels.

It's no small order to co-ordinate and manage multiple channels at once but at Equator - it's our speciality. We had already been managing and growing their affiliate programme since 2005.

Our teams worked collaboratively to make sure all the channels are working together, sharing the best practical knowledge from Ramada Jarvis' analytics and deliberating on what would be the best placement of the client's valuable budget in order to deliver maximum return.

All of this work took place under one roof, instead of across multiple agencies - each agency with different agendas and conflicting ideas. This created a much more relaxed and straightforward experience for Ramada Jarvis, given that they only had one team to call on for all their marketing queries; one team to rely on to deliver their targets.

Paid and Natural Search

The strategy was to cost-effectively dominate the search engines and follow a potential customer from their initial search for a hotel right through to completing their booking.

We used the user insight we gained to develop the off-site campaign around specific areas of geographical interest. On-site we used the insight to streamline how users refine their choice of requirements and facilities. The end-goal being to remove any barriers to sale from one end of the process to the other.

The account is now 10 times the size it was when we took it on. ROI is 25% higher and has now become an integral tool in hotel promotion, bringing sales to corners of the business not previously reachable!

Affiliate Marketing

We took on the Affiliate Marketing campaign for Ramada Jarvis in 2005 and we've worked closely with their team and the Affiliates since, creating campaigns that have doubled revenue every year thus far.

This is testament to our approach of developing and maintaining close personal relationships with individual Affiliates, supporting them with great incentives.

It is down to the success of this effort that we were given the chance to expand our remit into the other digital marketing channels as well as the website itself.

The Website

We distilled the overall requirements for the new website down to a single objective - create a channel that was immediately appealing to Ramada Jarvis' target audience. The project demanded good design, efficient and robust technology, integration and intelligence.

Using our knowledge of what works in the world of hotels on the web and adding extensive usability testing, the all-new Ramada Jarvis website now showcases a series of new features that anticipate what the customer is looking for and deliver information in an efficient manner. Some of the features of the site include:

An innovative two stage booking process with Opera (the booking system used by most hotels) fully integrated into their back office.
Optimised search functionality including drive times.
Ektron: A new content management system.
Real market intelligence with Omniture.
Regular local event information via a live feed from What's on When.

We can do it for you too: If you dial us on 0141 229 1800(and ask for Garry Hamilton); If you send us a message; Or if you visit our studio

Show me the big guns

Would you like to know a little more about how we did what we did on this project?