A new Magento ecommerce website for the hotel group's exclusive gifts & experiences.
Services provided
The Dorchester Collection is a group of nine luxury hotels located in the USA, Europe and London. StrategiQ completely rebuilt the group’s Magento ecommerce platform, which offers gifts and experiences to customers globally.
The hotels were collectively facing several functionality issues with the Magento Commerce platform and appointed StrategiQ to migrate their inventory onto a re-designed Magento Open Source solution.
Our proposal incorporated a strategy to resolve the hotels’ key functional issues, increase profitability and improve the website’s appearance and usability in line with a wider branding update coordinated in 2017/18.
In addition to countless and persistent bugs, the (at the time) Magento Enterprise platform set-up was expensive, difficult to work with and did not utilise an international strategy to allow each hotel to sell gifts and experiences in their local currency.
We started our approach by fully establishing the issues and opportunities with the existing Magento Commerce platform. This allowed us to work with the Dorchester Collection’s in-house marketing and development team to define a strategy and specification to create a new platform for growth and operational efficiency across the nine global hotels.
All key functionality to maintain, replace or introduce was isolated during the early stages, allowing a prototype website to be built and informing the creative phase for the redesign of the platform. Our two primary functional objectives were to replace the digital gift card and redemption system and allow each hotel to list their inventory in their own local currency respectively. During our discovery phase, we also identified and proposed a migration to the Community (Open Source) version of Magento as the hotels were not utilising the key Enterprise features.
The new platform was launched in time for the busy Christmas holiday period, and we implemented the required migration to ensure all SEO was maintained (and improved upon) for the launch of the new website.
"StrategiQ have been incredibly supportive with the launch of the new Dorchester Collection Gifts & Experiences store. We've really enjoyed working with the whole team and appreciated the hard work (and additional hours) put in to allow us to be live ahead of the busy holiday season. The new site really reflects the essence of the brand and is much more engaging and user-friendly. It is already a huge step forward for us and we’re delighted with it."
Claire Bell,
Global Digital Manager
