Shelborne Beach Resort

The Business Challenge

The Shelborne Beach Resort in South Beach is one of the largest independent hotels in Florida. The Shelborne's General Manager was faced with a challenge common to many of today's independently owned and operated hotels: "How can we significantly increase online bookings coming directly through our hotel web site?" According to a recent survey compiled by PhoCusWright, most hoteliers report that less than 5% of their reservations are being made directly via their hotel's own reservation system. The majority of online reservations are coming from consolidators and intermediaries who provide independent hotels with little direct control over inventory and pricing and create the risk of long term rate and brand erosion.

The POWERi Solution

Working with the Shelborne's sales and marketing team, POWERi designed, developed and deployed a new website for the Shelborne Beach Resort. The new site incorporates POWERi's proprietary online reservation system. The system enables web site visitors to review room availability and rates, as well as book a reservation in three simple steps. After completing the new web site and installing the new reservation system, POWERi initiated a series of digital marketing campaigns intended to build web site traffic. These campaigns included HTML and rich media emails targeted directly to demographically selected travel agents and consumers. Additionally, POWERi has implemented a series of search engine optimization procedures designed to increase the hotel's rankings among the most popular search engines.

The Results

In its first two weeks, the new Shelborne online reservation system generated over $15,000 in new reservations. According to the Shelborne's General Manager, "the new web site and reservation system is easy to use and to administer. Our sales and marketing staff have complete and instantaneous control over our inventory. We can monitor demand and have the flexibility to change pricing in real-time. The new site design is clear and concise, with an exceptionally well-designed navigation system that enables users to view room and price information with ease. We have sold more rooms via this new web site in the last two weeks than we sold all of last year through our old web site."