Wildhive Callow Hall is providing the ultimate customer experience courtesy of its partnership with onejourney. The ‘back to nature’ luxury hotel wanted to excite its guests’ with a digital-first, seamless booking experience. In addition, Wildhive Callow Hall wanted a deeper understanding of guests’ booking behaviour – whether they were staying overnight or simply visiting for a meal.
The challenge
Nestled in the UK’s Peak District, the hotel has won numerous accolades as one of the country’s best hotels since it opened in 2021. The luxury escape offers 15 bedrooms in a country house, plus two treehouses and 11 hives set within 35 acres of woodland, plus wild meadows and gardens.
With such a variety of accommodation, wellbeing choices and a popular restaurant, Wildhive wanted to ensure its guests were able to easily navigate the on-property options and curate a booking online that best suited their needs. The hotel wished to provide an equally intuitive digital booking experience for non-residents wanting to visit its restaurants.
Opening its doors in challenging times for the hospitality industry, Wildhive also sought high visibility of its booking metrics and to drive direct bookings online, reducing the reliance on reception to make out of hours bookings and free them to focus on delivering customer service. Boosting operational efficiencies was prized.
The results
Onejourney’s extended analytics, presented in real-time via an easy-to-use dashboard, continues to provide the hotel with a strong grasp on booking trends across its guest rooms and dining areas. Direct hotel room revenue has increased by 26% and the conversion rate beats industry averages reducing abandoned basket rates by an impressive 52%.
Weekends and Mondays – often taken as a day off by staff after a busy weekend of service – proved the busiest and most lucrative booking days for Wildhive. The always-on functionality of onejourney boosted customer satisfaction by allowing guests and diners to reserve bedrooms and table times with just a few clicks, at any time, from anywhere and any device.
Mondays proved the most popular day for making bookings – and the most valuable: 17% of all bookings were made on a Monday, equating to 22% of total revenue. The rest of the week was relatively evenly distributed with 30% of bookings coming on the weekend, and Saturday driving the next highest revenue (18%).
Jeremy Whitworth, General Manager of Wildhive, said: “We knew it was important to offer 24/7 booking access to people looking to stay or dine with us – that’s why having an improved digital booking journey was vital. The reliable and intuitive digital booking experience onejourney provides allows my team to focus on providing exceptional customer service and not have to be torn between answering the phone or an email and engaging with an in-person guest.”
Booking data also showed out of hours was the peak for booking volume, with the highest number of bookings placed between 7pm and 9pm. The highest value bookings were placed around 1pm and 5pm.
Whitworth said: “Being able to offer work/life balance is not always possible in the hospitality industry; we simply aren’t a 9-5 operation. But knowing that onejourney is servicing our bookings during the peak window of 7pm to 9pm reassures us that we don’t need to schedule a late night reservation agent. This lets the team focus on handling more complex reservations that require in-person assistance.”
The property has also been able to track multi-basket orders – essential for its burgeoning reputation as a destination restaurant. Bookings to date included over 20% with multiple offerings, with 3% of orders confirming two or more table reservations.
The impact
Developing a deep understanding of its customer profiles has been welcomed by Wildhive’s management, with booking data analysed and trends provided in an easy-to-digest dashboard.
“With just a glance, we can see information such as our geographic source markets and age range of our bookers, or the average booking lead time,” said Whitworth. “This is helping us shape our marketing and communications strategy, as well as consider future services and amenities.”
Over 70% of traffic to the Wildhive website is mobile and more than 50% of bookings are made on a mobile device. Paired with its knowledge on peak booking days and times, this created an understanding of a typical Wildhive guest’s behaviour – scrolling the website at night when with family or friends after a busy day, booking a nature-inspired getaway to reconnect with both nature and their loved ones.
Simon Bullingham, CEO at Journey Hospitality, home of onejourney, said: “Just because people want to reconnect with nature doesn’t mean they are disconnected from technology. That’s why providing them with a seamless all-in-one digital booking experience has proven so essential for Wildhive. Today’s consumer expects to book what they want, when they want it – whether that’s a simple room booking, a wider itinerary with restaurant bookings or just to visit for a bite to eat.”