Overview

Mirvac Hotels had the same dilemma as any marketing focused, brand aware, multi-venue operation world-wide. Generate more with less. How does group marketing offer the ability for individual hotels to respond - just-in-time - to regional needs without additional resources while retaining brand control?

Mirvac Hotels needed a better website with better content, more easily found in search engines to create better qualified traffic to generate more bookings whilst still capturing the emotion associated with travel. By employing the use of Blocks, Square Circle Triangle's fully hosted marketing platform, and some well thought-out and executed design, Mirvac Hotels now have a portal style site at www.mirvachotels.com.au and each of the 42 hotels have a fully functioning editable website to promote the unique nature of their hotel and respond quickly to local demands and occupancy rates.

All sites have free-text and map-search functions that are populated from live data and search based algorithms. The customer/user now has a well indexed, easy to use site with powerful text and map search functions and a simple and very effective booking engine that integrates live with the Hotels Property management system. The content is tailored, optimised, relevant and fresh.

In site search

The site provides a choice of search options, i.e. international guests can use the map to locate the hotels near landmarks and activities, local customers and navigate by links or use text search. Clear information hierarchy and elegant design allows each destination "hotel" brand its own distinct personality within a template system that provides continuity across the Mirvac Hotel group.

The online booking engine provides clear information to what's on offer without complicating the process of booking online. Conversion rates for online bookings have risen two-fold since overhauling the site and booking engine.

The search functions for both the mapping and text searching are unique.

Dynamic Flash Mapping
The map search uses best practice flash to place hotels and landmarks from the individual websites and is retro fitted to accept 'packages' ie. "hotel and bridge climb".

Dynamic Text Search
The text search uses a similar approach to Google by crawling for content and indexing based on content, links and traffic. This means the search gets better with time.

With each Hotel having a fully functioning website, they can easily manage including adding pages, content, linking images etc with full branding control at head office.

Geek Sheet

The mapping interface was developed using open-source technologies (specifically MapServer) from publicly available world vector data accurate to a scale of 1:1000000. This allowed us to create a unique flash based map powered by dynamically generated, geographically accurate data.

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 realtime availability checking and booking management.
The underlying Blocks platform is a Xen virtual server cluster of Ruby on Rails apps which allows us to scale and maintain system performance with agility and ease
We conformed as closely as possible with the W3C mark-up validation rules although strict validation was not a primary concern the site was designed to be as semantically-correct as possible and to function effectively within any text-based browser (eg. lynx). Anywhere Flash content was used on the site, pure HTML was provided as a fallback, to ensure that all content was as accesible as possible.