Brand Distinction - InterContinental 2.0

-- Hotels, 7/7/2008 9:39:00 AM

Contributed by Bill Peer, director, Enterprise Architecture, IHG, Inc.

In today’s increasingly high-tech world, it is commonly accepted wisdom that your web presence can make or break your business. This is especially true in the hotel industry where an increasing percentage of reservations come via the Internet. But when InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) decided to revamp the web site for its iconic luxury brand InterContinental Hotels & Resorts, the company faced additional challenges in brand distinction.

With its portfolio of seven established hotel brands including InterContinental Hotels & Resorts, Crowne Plaza, Staybridge Suites, Hotel Indigo, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, and Candlewood Suites (almost 4,000 hotels in nearly 100 countries) IHG’s web presence was notable for the visual consistency among its properties, including an interface that provided immediate access to reservations. That consistency became a challenge when the initiative to launch a distinctive, media-rich web presence for the brand was first discussed. In addition to providing a familiar reservations dashboard, the InterContinental web site needed to convey the brand’s commitment to deliver unique experiences to guests.

“The experience is all about how the customer can be enriched by that destination,” said Bronagh Lavery, brand lead for the intercontinental.com project. “It’s the concierge recommending a little espresso bar ten minutes away that makes the best espresso in the city, rather than the Starbucks two blocks down. That type of knowledge provides an enriching experience that our guests are increasingly looking for when they travel to our destinations.”

The Engine Room
To convey this type of experience to web visitors, IHG embarked on an 18-month project development journey, from consumer research to launch. Lavery was temporarily relocated to Atlanta from her hometown of London, England (the UK headquarters of IHG) to work more closely with the project.

“During the actual development phase, a team of 13 including representatives from development, QA, content, solutions, business, and the brand integration were moved into a 20 x 25-foot room without cubicles or partitions,” said Bryson Koehler, IHG Vice President of Revenue and Guest Technology. “This put everyone in close proximity for rapid resolution and technical agility.” Koehler added that the space quickly became known as “the Engine Room.”

“The Engine Room was a good thing,” according to Eli Phetteplace, a Solutions Architect who worked on the project. “Basically, if there was a question, you could just clarify it and move forward. You didn’t have to wait until later in the week and schedule a meeting. All the decision-making authorities were right there in the room.”

After six months in the Engine Room, the completely revamped, state-of-the-art InterContinental web site was released in November 2007.



Next Generation Media
The web presence leveraged specific types of new media to enhance the browsing experience, including video clips, interactive Flash interfaces, a blog, and a portfolio of visually rich photographs.

Videos: Over 100 mini-video travelogues were shot on location, starring the actual concierge from InterContinental hotels around the world. In the video, the concierge takes the user through a personal tour of the area. The two-to-four minute, high-quality videos can be downloaded in a mobile format (.mp4, .mov, or .wmv) for later viewing by a busy traveler (say, at the airport, on a plane, or in a cab).

Flash: The web site itself utilizes a vibrant Flash interface. Destination pages feature interactive Flash maps that highlight local dining, shopping, and cultural attractions. Guests can see the location of the highlighted area in relation to the InterContinental hotel, and print out a PDF version of the map.

Photography: A complete audit of existing content revealed that most of the images in the prior brand web site were outdated. So, IHG undertook a massive global photography shoot and completely reshot 75% of all InterContinental hotels to ensure a consistent look and feel for the new web presence (more than 10,000 new images).

To host this array of content, three portals link seamlessly, guiding visitors through the InterContinental experience before they even arrive at the hotel:

• www.intercontinental.com – the brand web site. Content is divided into reservations, hotel information pages, and location information featuring a massive library of photos, videos, interactive maps, proprietary travel tips, and other insights.

• www.intercontinentalvideo.com – houses the brand’s library of specially produced destination videos, as well as video content for insider experiences at selected destinations and sponsorships with Aston Martin Racing, National Geographic, and BBC World.

• travel.intercontinental.com – a travel blog that showcases the web site’s impressive media library and allows the brand to get information to market quickly. The blog also addresses a communications challenge: it gives the press a tangible picture of the differentiating and newsworthy initiatives in which the brand is investing.

Jenifer Zeigler, Senior Vice President, Global Brand Management, InterContinental Hotels & Resorts, said: “We went into this exercise with strong permission-to-believe that we could balance form and function. An anchor part of the mission was about evolving the website to be congruent with the brand positioning, and to inhabit the traits of the brand. The desire to have a site design that reflected the brand’s look, feel, and behavior did not have to conflict with the all-important function of enabling transactions and booking.  I give great compliments to the design and development teams for achieving this mission.”

Reservations and More
Reservations are available from the home page, but visitors are equally drawn to the robust media, vibrant photographs, and sleek design of the intercontinental.com web site. “This was a big leap forward,” Lavery emphasized, “to not create an overtly transaction-oriented web site. That absolutely had to happen as part of the brand differentiation.”

Giving site visitors a taste of the luscious InterContinental experience was key to successfully launching intercontinental.com and distinguishing the brand.

“It had to differentiate the InterContinental brand from competitor brands,” says Lavery about the new web presence. “It also had to differentiate InterContinental from other IHG brands. That was the main point. The other point was to heighten the user experience.”

©2008 IHG, Inc.