Repositioning a weekend stay as the place to get away
Our goal was to create an exciting and inspiring organic content campaign, built around Harbour Hotel’s differing audience personas and promoting the unique offerings of each hotel and its surroundings
“The Escape is the most professional agency I have ever worked with. The quality of their team, and the quality of the output, was exceptional from start to finish.”
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In need of more creativity
Selling the place, not just the room
For six years we helped Harbour Hotels sell the places around its hotels as much as the rooms inside them. A new website design lifted direct bookings by 30%, a Christmas campaign grew voucher revenue by £200k year on year, and HarHOLIDAY made the case for a Harbour summer as a holiday in its own right.
What Harbour needed
Harbour Hotels runs a group of boutique hotels in some of the UK’s best coastal and city spots, from St Ives and Salcombe to Bristol and Richmond. It had a strong name for stylish weekend breaks, and two commercial problems to solve. Its website had to join up separate booking systems for rooms, spa and gifts. And summers went quiet as guests headed abroad.
A website built to book direct
We designed and built a new website that brought every hotel, room, spa treatment and gift voucher into one place, connected to each of Harbour’s booking engines. In its first full month, bounce rate fell 53% year on year and direct bookings rose 30%.
Christmas, outside the box
Our “Think outside the box” paid social campaign turned Harbour stays and spa days into Christmas gifts, growing voucher revenue by £200k year on year, with 35% more voucher purchases and 52% more click-throughs from social
HarHOLIDAY: making the place part of the stay
Summer brought a different challenge: persuade people to see a Harbour stay as a holiday in itself. HarHOLIDAY ran for 14 weeks on Instagram, across the group account and 14 individual hotels, under the line “A Harbour summer awaits”. Each hotel had a “Swipe for summer” carousel of three hotel experiences and three local favourites, from Salcombe Dairy to Tate St Ives, alongside polls that got people planning. City break or coastal escape? Night out or chill out? Richmond Park or the South West Coast Path?
What changed
- +30% direct bookings
- £200k more voucher revenue, year on year
- +35% voucher purchases
- HarHOLIDAY: 14 hotels, 14 weeks, around 98 pieces of content
Over six years, Harbour’s marketing moved from selling rooms to selling places, on a website that made them easy to book direct.
“The Escape is the most professional agency I have ever worked with…”
Matthew Roach
former Head of Marketing, Harbour Hotels
