A journey to a multi-hotel enterprise
As The Pig have matured from founder-led start-up to investor-owned multi-brand enterprise, we have worked in partnership since the opening of the very first hotel. We have been there every step of the way.
We continually review the business, consumer and competitor landscape to identify focus areas for technology and marketing investment. Along the way, we always ensure that the technology solutions are scalable to meet the demands of a brand that will experience many challenges in its operating landscape.
From the peaks and troughs of booking demand through COVID, high profile PR and above-the-line broadcast exposure, to increasingly more complex business requirements with each new hotel addition.
Here’s a few of the projects and initiatives that have been executed on this journey.
A ground breaking booking journey
Our first challenge was removing all reliance on the Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) with guests making all bookings direct. This would allow us firstly to create a brand built on customer loyalty, where customer data was owned by the brand which we were able to leverage for repeat bookings. Secondly, as the brand was formed as a ‘food first’ experience, the OTA’s were simply not able to distignuish The Pig as a ‘restaurant with rooms’ - it would be listed as just another ‘hotel with a restaurant’. The positioning was key to the success of the brand.
With that in mind, we created a booking journey allowing guests to book a table and a room at the same time. It was a first of it’s kind, as we connected multiple booking engine APIs together - to give the guest a seamless experience when booking direct. Over the years we have integrated Oracle OWS (Opera Web Services), Oracle Hospitality Integration Platform (OHIP), Quadranet and SevenRooms with Adyen Payment
This booking journey has remained a technical foundation for THE PIG, and we are continually hypothesising, refining and tweaking it - using analytics, guest and staff feedback to release both minor and major iterations fortnightly. This has led to us maintaining an industry leading conversion rate of over 3%.
Scaling up with enterprise-level tech.
The website was built around a single hotel concept that could be multiplied outwards - adding on additional, similar hotels as needed.
However each new PIG presents us with new opportunities and problems to solve - for example the addition of a pool, a cinema or even a village pub. In addition to these unique considerations for each PIG, we also experienced a turbulent period, filled with unpredictable obstacles. The rapid introduction and removal of hospitality rules durng COVID created a difficult environment for bookings. Extremely high profile TV exposure, such as when Fred Sirioux visited THE PIG on BBC Two’s Remarkable Places to Eat, led to extraordinary demand. Ultimately, these challenges led to website instability, as the APIs and now-legacy tech couldn’t provide the feature functionality we needed, or keep up with demand.
The ongoing stability of The PIGs ecosystem is an extremely valuable investment for maintaining brand integrity. With that in mind, we spent several years re-architecting the original code base to a more modern and enterprise solution, to ensure longer-term maintainability and reliability. We did this chiefly by evolving to a microservice architecture, to fully allow standalone components to be managed separately.
To further assure reliability and scalability, as new technology is onboarded and traffic to the site continues to grow, we perform regular load testing and penetration tests and round the clock monitoring of services. The site has experienced no performance issues since this investment. The Pig is built on Umbraco CMS and hosting & monitoring on Microsoft Azure
This continuous investment into the longevity of tech is far more cost efficient than an ongoing cycle of re-platform and rebuild.
Digital marketing strategy & execution.
The Pig has a brand offering that people immediately resonate with and in its infancy the hyper-local menu concept was groundbreaking. Whilst building the brand, we made certain that gathering zero party data was always a KPI and have developed an incredibly loyal database of email subscribers (open rates 30% above industry averages). THE PIG has been rewarded with a fantastic ratio of high demand to low availability, and we really focused marketing efforts on shoulder month (off-peak) campaigns.
In recent years, we have seen a shift in consumer behaviour due to a combination of challenges. Inspired by UK and world events, the cost of living crisis, and economic uncertainty, guests are making and cancelling bookings at the last minute.
So we embrace an agile marketing approach, continuously analysing data and trends to adjust our marketing strategies. Every quarter we set a number of growth hypotheses, run campaigns, and measure the short term impact - whether that is in testing new markets, new channels, or adapting our messaging. Digital marketing services provided to The Pig include SEO, Meta advertising, Google Advertising including Google Hotel Ads and Pmax for Travel, CRO, data and analytics, content optimisation, email marketing, branding and design and event marketing including for sister brand Smoked & Uncut Festival.
Last year the return on marketing spend (ROMS) averaged 7900% (agency fees plus media spend)
Irresistibly personalised and optimised guest experience.
As hotel profits are continually squeezed by rate sensitivity and rising operating costs, our priority has been on targeting guests with High Life Time Value (LTV) and improving Average Order Value (AOV).
By implementing Cendyn CRM, The Pig have been able to pull together guest data from multiple sources to provide a single unified guest profile. This is extremely powerful for front-of-desk teams - not just to to provide a more personal service, but also to allow us to further unlock the potential of of the zero and 1st-party data we have acquired since launch.
We’ve also developed effective, segmented and highly personalised pre, during and post stay emails to drive additional revenue touch-points. Additionally, we’re developing a My Booking Dashboard to allow guests to self-manage, personalise and amend their trips, alleviating time and pressure for the reservations team.
We are integrating UMarketing Suite to bring smart-personalisation into the website experience. Profiling guests by - which Pigs they most frequent, and whether they like to travel solo or with family, enables us to serve the most relevant content and offers, and push both the conversion rates and AOV further.