Mirvac Hotels - Case Study

Project objectives
Increase user engagement (time on site, decrease bounce rate, increase pages viewed/visit).

• Increase booking conversions.
• Increase enquiries to functions and events.
• Give Mirvac Hotels ability to add content to respond to local needs.
• Increase traffic from organic search.
• Offer better functionality for search.

Outcomes increasing booking revenue was addressed 3 ways
1. Driving more traffic - primarily from high search engine rankings.

2. Improving the user experience throughout the site through: clear visual design; effective, easy navigation; and fresh and relevant information.

3. Easy and safe booking functionality.

How the project meets the target market requirements
Improved booking functionality.

A secure and professional booking engine which encourages people to feel safer booking online.

An immediate feedback on availability provides information so users don't feel they need to ring.

The extensive information provided helps people who aren't familiar with the hotel to make decisions.

The elegant design and clear information hierarchy makes the site easy and inviting to use.

The international profile was raised through increased search engine rankings globally.

How the target market interact:
The unique map functionality provides a location-based search across the hotel chain.

The extensive hotel and local information assist the user's decision making. This includes providing up to date local weather.

Key creative aspects of the project:
The clear information hierarchy and elegant design allows each destination "hotel" to brand its own distinct personality under the umbrella of the Mirvac Hotel group.

The screen design and colour provide obvious differentiation between hotels and resorts.

The mapping design balances geographic context and search results, while marketing overlays (on the map itself) allows emphasised brand/marketing messages without dispensing valuable screen real estate.

Unique technical features:
To provide better usability, the site's search functionality uses two distinct indexes. The map search uses an index for referencing information related to all hotel sites, while the page search feature uses a site specific index giving more detailed results and will adjust relevance weightings over time based on user click-throughs. Both indexes are powered by the sphinx full-text search engine.

The booking engine is fully integrated (using SOAP) with Mirvac's system in Singapore to provide real-time availability checking and booking management.