RESPLENDENT CEYLON’S COMPREHENSIVE DIGITAL SOLUTION
Web Development and Digital Marketing
Travel & Hospitality
Resplendent Ceylon is a boutique, luxury collection of three resorts, with two more on the way. Often listed among the ‘top 20’ resorts in Asia, this unique collection of Relais & Châteaux properties, each captures the essence of its locale. Of the three resorts, Ceylon Tea Trails is among the world’s top 1% on TripAdvisor, recently making it to the Condé Nast Traveller Gold List.
Cape Weligama was proudly featured among the ‘50 best resorts in the world’ at the Condé Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice Awards for
2022 and Wild Coast Tented Lodge, the chain’s newest property is a media darling.
With average room night pricing at US$ 500+ and the smaller room inventory available at each property, Resplendent Ceylon needed to optimize their digital distribution and engage potential guests across the decision-making process. The average lead time for bookings exceeded 100 days and guests typically took 3-4 months of research and consideration in making a booking.
When Antyra first engaged Resplendent Ceylon, each property had an individual website, and the parent brand was not deeply connected at the property level from a user discovery perspective. In the desire to create a unique identity for each property, the parent brand had taken a backseat.
Our first recommendation was to create Resplendent Ceylon as the parent website and bring each property as a sub-site within the fold. This approach immediately saw a jump in brand discovery as fans of one resort were now clicking through to the other resorts, as well as exploring journeys: a multi-resort packaging approach. A 26% growth in cross-traffic was noted between the different hotel brands in the first three months.
To portray luxury and the uniqueness of each property, Antyra introduced hand drawn elements, created property specific aesthetic markers and customized the individual home pages of each property. With the ‘home’ of Resplendent’s digital presence firmly established, Antyra launched an omni-channel digital marketing strategy focusing on SEO, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Programmatic Advertising and Content Marketing.
Starting from scratch, each page of the website was considered as an entry point for a specific user journey and a comprehensive SEO strategy was created targeting both generic and brand keywords. This strategy helped Resplendent continuously achieve 1st page rankings for competitive keywords such as ‘Luxury Bungalows in Hatton, ‘Weligama Hotels’, and ‘Sri Lanka Infinity Pool’. A long tail strategy was also implemented focusing on destination content and nearby attractions using the website blog and a new destination content template. The site was achieving 1 st page rankings for attractions such as ‘Sithulpawwa’ and ‘Castlereagh’ while also performing for topics of interest such as ‘Migratory Birds in Sri Lanka’.
Google Ads are used effectively to protect the brand from other online distribution channels, while growing the brand footprint in key markets. Different ad campaigns and strategies are executed for short-haul and long-haul destinations, taking specific market conditions such as public holidays, summer vacations and similar into account. This targeted approach enabled Antyra to maximize budget utilization and maintain a continuous positive ROI to make Google Ads a viable channel. A monthly ROI between 5 -8:1 was maintained for all ad budgets spent, while brand only had an ROI of 12:1 on average.
Social Media advertising and promotions were used in tangent with other marketing channels as a visual medium for pushing specific offers, re-marketing, sharing galleries, videos and page behavior-based engagement. Social Media content was A/B tested for effectiveness. In one example, nine different images of one room type in Cape Weligama were tested to identify the best CTR.
Check-in and check-out dates selected on the booking engine were tracked as custom metrics on Google Analytics and were used for re-marketing specific offers based on website rate searches.
Antyra synced weekly with Resplendent Ceylon’s ecommerce team to introduce specific offers and drive room night budgets at the property level, while maintaining desired ARR.