Synonymous with luxury, The Langham Hotels and Resorts operate globally, delivering a five-star experience since the opening of its London location in 1865. The Langham Hospitality Group now has an extensive hotel portfolio with more than 4,721 rooms in properties in countries including the UK, Australia, China and the USA.
The problem:
The Langham needed a sophisticated platform that would allow them to seamlessly update business information and monitor and respond to reviews. With nearly 40 locations and the importance of a robust reviews strategy so key to the hotel industry, manually updating and responding was not scalable to deliver the level of excellence in customer experience that The Langham strived for.
The solution:
As a luxury hotel chain, reputation management is fundamentally important to the business. The Langham Hotels and Resorts pride themselves on an exceptional experience and they wanted this experience to extend to the beginning of the customer journey. By aggregating reviews in the Yext platform, The Langham were provided with a view of specific improvements through the review programme that needed to be made in order to bolster their five-star reputation. Kasia Rudnik, Director of eCommerce at The Langham Hotels and Resorts said that “having worked with Yext in a previous role, they were the first technology partner I implemented when I joined The Langham. For me it was part of a checklist of tools and I was on a quest to make Yext a global technology partner. It was a mission-critical element of our digital strategy.”
Beyond this, the relationship with Yext also underpins The Langham’s search strategy. It is crucial they have consistent information across platforms, not only for customers but the search engine crawlers, and that doesn’t just mean on Google and Tripadvisor. Rudnik adds that “we know that over 66% of travellers won’t stay in a hotel if there are no management responses to reviews. By responding to our customers, we show them we’re listening but also gain valuable insight into how to improve.” Using the metrics from Yext’s competitive intelligence, they’re able to make strategic business decisions. This sort of insight is traditionally quite costly but it’s a great addition to access other competitors.
The result:
The relationship between Yext and The Langham continues to thrive. During the first few months of working with Yext, the Langham saw their number of profile views from Yext powered listings increase by 112% compared to the same period in the previous year. This increase in visibility lead directly to more consumers visiting the website to book a stay, facilitating a higher conversion rate. Furthermore, The Langham is using the Yext search experience cloud to manage its listings and reviews from their dashboard, as well as leveraging competitive intelligence to inform their strategy.
In working with Yext, The Langham have been able to add a touch of luxury to their digital touchpoints, before customers even reach the check-in desk and they also have heightened visibility and control which allows them to manage reviews and provide rich content for customers.
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