Timeless luxury meets experience innovation

Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group owns and operates some of the world’s most luxurious hotels, resorts and residences.

Mandarin Oriental has properties in the world’s most iconic destinations. The Group operates 38 hotels and 11 residences in 25 countries and territories. Each property reflects the Group’s heritage as well as the local culture in which it is embedded.

Above all, the Mandarin Oriental brand is famous for luxury and white-glove service.

In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread to all corners of the world, the travel and hospitality sectors were forced to close. With almost no revenue coming in, many hotel operators slashed their investments in customer experience and digitization. Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, by contrast, recognized this once-in-a-generation crisis as an opportunity to double down on online customer experiences and customer loyalty.

Engaging travelers who embrace a new kind of luxury

Historically, Mandarin Oriental’s brand has had an inward focus. It communicated an Old World vision of luxury. This did a great job of highlighting the grandeur of the properties, the amenities available and the staff’s high level of service — all of the things inside of a property.

But luxury travelers also crave unique experiences and authentic connections. Luxury travelers want to be inspired, to be immersed in a culture, to experience the essence of wherever they go. They travel to reconnect, to explore and to rediscover familiar escapes.

A digital experience that didn’t feel luxurious

The legacy Mandarin Oriental site had several pain points: Users often struggled to find what they were looking for, ran into dead ends and generally found booking flows overly complicated. On top of that, the design felt outdated. The experience this created didn’t reflect the seamless, exceptional service guests could expect from each hotel property.

The case for experience elevation

Valtech and Mandarin Oriental originally partnered to replatform the Group’s website. After both partners recognized the delta between what luxury consumers expect and the experience Mandarin Oriental’s digital presence was delivering, we agreed it was time to craft an entirely new digital expression of the Mandarin Oriental experience.

Mandarin Oriental identified clear goals for this transformation:

• Increase direct bookings online.

• Accelerate revenue growth.

• Boost web traffic and engagement.

• Enhance the visibility of the Fans of M.O. loyalty program.

To get a better understanding of what luxury consumers expect from an iconic hospitality brand like Mandarin Oriental, our team conducted more than 50 one-on-one, in-depth interviews with luxury travelers from around the world.

What we learned:

• Most luxury consumers are looking for once-in-a-lifetime experiences that help them build deeper connections within themselves, with their loved ones and with the world.

• Guests’ behaviors, expectations and preferences are fluid. The same person who craves a big weekend out in Shanghai might also want a relaxing beach vacation in Bodrum.

• When they are planning their next trips, these travelers first want to be immersed in the destination — long before they touch down. They seek out destinations that inspire them, delve into all the details that make a destination appealing, and look for travel brands that can make those journeys personally meaningful.

From these interviews, we were able to create a range of customer personas and corresponding user journeys.

Stepping inside a Mandarin Oriental property is an awe-inspiring moment. The design, the attention to detail, the care put into creating that experience are all immediately apparent.

We wanted to evoke that same sense of awe with the brand’s digital property.

Immersive discovery

We designed MandarinOriental.com to be a curated presentation of the world’s most desirable locations. Rich photography and videography bring to life both the grandeur of each property and, crucially, how that property belongs to the destination around it:

• How the flagship Hong Kong hotel nestles into the city’s famous skyline, offering unobstructed views of Victoria Harbor.

• How splashes pervade the Lake Como resort, from poolside cocktails to the wake of the iconic wooden boats as they pass within arm’s reach.

• How the Caribbean sea breeze passes over the villas and through the leafy trees at the Canouan resort.

Experience-driven booking

Booking flows mirror the journeys visitors go on as they chase their inspiration. Experiences — dinner for two, a massage for one, a helicopter tour of Shenzhen — are presented alongside accommodation booking. Each booking flow offers personalized suggestions to make the guest’s stay that much more memorable.

An invitation to locals

An important lesson from the pandemic: There is a huge market in each property’s back yard. For example, the flagship hotel in Hong Kong has a gorgeous izakaya, The Aubrey, on the 25th floor. The Aubrey has been recognized as one of the 50 best bars in Asia, and it serves an indulgent weekend brunch. Locals and visitors alike book tables each weekend for oysters, wagyu meatball skewers, unrivaled views of Victoria Harbor and the two-hour, free-flow Champagne service. We designed the new site to drive these kinds of local bookings.

The tech that powers the ecosystem

We built the new platform with a microservices headless architecture on Sitecore Managed Cloud. This gives Mandarin Oriental’s digital teams a single source of truth for hotel content. Content structures can be reused across different components, and content editors can find the digital assets they need quickly.

Optimizing experiences with data

Our creative teams and our data teams worked together closely, both prior to launch and post-launch, to analyze guest behaviors and refine the user experience accordingly. This was an iterative process in which the teams:

• Tracked user flows.

• Made adjustments as needed.

• Continuously monitored enhancements through meticulous analytics.

This process of ongoing refinement ensures a dynamic, user-centric platform experience.

The expertise Valtech provided made the transformation easy by elevating Mandarin Oriental’s digital experience to a level where we are already seeing exciting growth in customer engagement and booking value.

- Peter Norris, VP, Digital, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group

We exceeded every one of Mandarin Oriental’s goals:

• Increase direct bookings online. After the new site launched, we were able to meet and even exceed Mandarin Oriental’s goals for direct bookings.

• Accelerate revenue growth. The Group has seen a 62% year-on-year increase in revenue per booking.

• Boost web traffic and engagement. The site has seen year-on-year increases in new visits (41%), return visits (49%) and organic traffic (91%).

The work also received wide industry recognition. Our partnership with Mandarin Oriental has won several awards, including:

• The Hotel-Vendor Partnership Award at Hospitality Technology’s Hotel Visionary Awards.

• Best Experience Transformation at the Sitecore Experience Awards.

• Outstanding Website at the Web Marketing Association’s WebAward Competition for Website Development.