Gretna Hotel Launches New Website

The Gables Hotel in Gretna has gone live with their new website this week.

The property in the famous town is a beautiful turn of the century Grade 11 listed property, situated in the heart of Gretna with gardens laid to lawn, floral borders and shady trees. It is ideally located to explore Dumfries and Galloway with its forests and lochs, or historic Carlisle and the northern lakes with designer shopping at the Gretna Gateway being five minutes away.

The site has been designed by Ayrshire based web developers The Edge and uses the state of the art hospitality content management system The Claymore Project to give the hotel complete control of content, images and indeed their search engine tags.

The Edge have been doing considerable online work in recent months for the hotel's sister company Darkstar featuring a group website, individual sites for each of the inns and pubs and the integration of Bookassist online booking engine for the accommodation providers.

3D Golf Merge with English Company

TYNESIDE’S Inta Group, which runs the Bill Goff golfing holiday brand, has joined forces with a Scottish company to look together for further growth across Europe.

The Newcastle firm’s merger with Ayr company 3D Golf has created a leisure business focused on golf and with a turnover of about £25m.

Chairman Paul Challen says the joint venture will concentrate on developing their respective strengths, with the North East company particularly strong in Portugal, where it employs 25 full-time staff, and 3D strong in France and Spain.

Mr Challen has built the Inta Group into a £12m turnover company after buying Bill Goff Golf Tours from its founder, the former fruit and veg seller and hotelier Bill Goff 15 years ago.
Back then it took 200 golfers abroad a year. Inta Group now takes 28,000 and takes annual bookings for 30,000 tee-times.

As well as Bill Goff, Inta Group has developed the 4golf.com no-frills internet golf holiday business and the golf course booking business teetimesanywhere.com.

The merger idea came at a recent golfing trade show where Mr Challen approached John Derwent, the son of 3D Golf founder Frank Derwent about a possible deal. Mr Challen said: “Our businesses are about the same size and it just seemed the right time for us to come together. We are very strong in Portugal and 3D have a strong presence in France and Spain.

“The merger allows us to further develop these core markets without competing against each other while giving us the opportunity to increase our joint profile in other European markets.”

Six Wolsey Lodges to Promote Southern Scotland

Another press release this afternoon highlights a succesful bid for support funding from a collection of Wolsey Lodges in the South of Scotland:

A new tourism project aimed at bringing more holiday money to the South of Scotland has won funding from Visit Scotland. "We're going to show people what they are missing," said Susan Crosthwaite (chairman of the group), and "We want to attract tourists who usually pass us by."

Six 4 and 5 star Wolsey Lodges have formed a group to create a collaborative tourism/business association aiming to position and market the South of Scotland as a quality destination in its own right. There is a fantastic response from associate members (paying a £50 membership fee) from the National Trust for Scotland, the Race Courses, Royal Botanic Gardens, Drumlanrig and Dumfries House to small individual businesses in the Borders and Ayrshire Food Networks.

From large 4 and 5 star hotels such as the McMillan Group and The Luxury Collection at Turnberry to small 4 and 5 star B&Bs such as Clint Lodge St. Boswells and Alt-na-Craig East Ayrshire.

This will be a sustainable tourism marketing group with the view of continual marketing of the area in years to follow. It will develop a Southern Scotland brand and position the area as a Quality and Luxury destination Visit Scotland is providing Growth Match Funding to enable this group to promote Southern Scotland as an end destination not just a destination to pass through or visit for one night.

As part of this project the group is creating a tourism membership for Southern Scotland which will be made up of quality tourism businesses in the area. The Southern Scotland brand and association will encourage cross-selling, collaboration and an aligned tourism focus
for the area.

The Initiative is being supported by the East, North and South Ayrshire Councils and South
Lanarkshire Council and will promote the area as both a short stay and long stay tourist destination with a wealth of quality accommodation, activities, businesses that can cater for the more affluent visitor all year round - keeping visitors in the South of Scotland.

The group will promote a range of itineraries and bespoke visitor packages to entice visitors and to encourage additional bed nights and spend in the area. This tourism marketing project is called "Southern Scotland Live It Love It" highlighting the luxury focus of the campaign and the magnificence of theunique destination. They are developing a brand associated with luxury
through all of our marketing activity.

A key element of our marketing will be the online activity. A major element of this is our website
www.holidaysouthernscotland.co.uk will be the customer contact point and other activity will feed into this site and direct visitors to the online facility where ever possible.

The group will promote the ‘quality’ range of businesses within the Southern Scotland brand. For example the Wolsley Lodges and other quality assured accommodation providers are complemented by a growing number and range of activities that visitors can do when here including golf, walking, cycling, food, whisky, history, culture.

The Southern Scotland, Live it, Love it project has received £12,500 funding from the VisitScotland Growth Fund. The VisitScotland Growth Fund is a £1 million fund available for well researched, new, collaborative marketing projects from groups of tourism businesses that have a strong customer focus and that operate at local, regional or national level. Funding from the VisitScotland Growth Fund is assisting in the establishment of the brand, it’s on-line presence and innovative digital promotional activities.

Wolsey Lodges is a collection of private homes, where the standard of hospitality, the location and the individuality of each house and host, has earned its unique place within the market today. The name Wolsey Lodge recalls Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey.

When he toured the realm in the 16th century, he expected to receive generous hospitality at any suitable country house along his way. This is the service and quality our lodges will want to offer you, wherever you travel.

Wolsey Lodges vary from very grand country houses, Elizabethan manor houses, Georgian mansions, Victorian country rectories, to lovingly restored cottages. Each have their individual attributes and features, whether it is the history, the location, the surroundings or the food.

Most importantly, all Wolsey Lodge hosts invite you into their homes because they want to share them with you. They are all dedicated to making your stay as enjoyable as possible.

Online Booking Fails Consumers

A thought provoking report came into our inbox this morning - American research granted but has much resonance with our sector in Scotland too.

The key points jumped out at me as I read them.

1. According to a recent study conducted by Merrill Lynch, online bookings as a share of total reservations increased from 30% in 2006 to 40% in 2008. The same study projects that 45% of hotel bookings will be made online by the year 2010.
2. Booking is the leading preoccupation of hotel website visitors. In this way, hospitality websites face a basket of challenges not dissimilar to mainline e-commerce sites: optimising the transactional experience for visitors who are onsite to book and ensuring that researchers and rate shoppers are efficiently shepherded down the booking funnel.
3. Industry analysts expect a measurable slowdown in travel this year, as both business and leisure consumers forego travel plans to save money.
4. Looking ahead, those who do travel will no doubt change their booking habits – specifically, they will wait until the last minute to book in order to obtain the best prices, combing through the online brokerage sites to shave valuable dollars off room rates. Cost sensitivity is already having a negative impact on hospitality website satisfaction scores. The two weakest attributes in the sector pertained directly to price and perceived sense of value.
5. Only 51% of bookers were capable of completing their tasks. While some of the reasons underpinning this low rate might have been outside the purview of the web experience, significant numbers of bookers reported problems with site navigation, the booking flow, and insufficient hotel/room information, all of which fall squarely on the plate of interactive marketers and website developers.

The report goes on to say that to counteract this, hotel websites will need to focus on better engaging and persuading visitors at incipient stages of the booking cycle.

The research indicated that 50% of website visitors were onsite for the first time and thus not acclimatised to the site navigation, architecture, and functionality. Hotel websites struggled to effectively cater to this segment reflected in lower conversion rates.

To boost their efficiency in a troubled economic climate, hotel websites will need to focus on delivering simpler, more intuitive site navigation, a streamlined booking process, and more robust content, supplemented with better pictures and more lifelike virtual tours.

Ian McCaig from Bookassist Scotland who provide the booking engine to an increasing number of accommodation providers across Scotland was not surprised at the findings, "A website requires three key elements; it must not only reflect the accommodation providers product graphically, it must also be able to be found by the potential traveller but most importantly it must be readily bookable. The booking engine must be easy to understand and navigate through at all stages - and this really must include language and currency options aimed at the increasing numbers of overseas markets visiting the UK.

Bookassist has recognised that conversion rates can only be maintained by making the Booking process user friendly. Creating unnecessary barriers such as frames linking out to other websites, or offering competitive product or no room descriptions only leads to the customer hitting the X button and closing down the process."

Ian McCaig continued, "The percentages however should be sobering to the accommodation provider and really should ensure that they look critically at the booking process on their own website;

• more than 1/3rd of the site visitors were on the site to book


• more than 50% failed to do so

In raw numbers? For every thousand site visitors to a website as many as 175 wanted to book but gave up! Hoteliers have to ensure that the booking process they offer is built around the convenience of the site visitor and not simply because the process comes with a PMS system or as an add on to third party distribution products. When deciding on how their bookings are offered the hotelier must make this the first box to be ticked; all else comes after."

You can get more information on Bookassist Booking Engine by clicking the link

Read the full iPerceptions Report here

Ayrshire golf is Open for business

West Coast Links Golf courses launch marketing initiative at tourism expo.

Ten of Scotland’s finest links golf courses today launched a new marketing initiative aimed at attracting more golfers from around the world to the Ayrshire Coast.

The group which embraces three Open Championship courses, including this year’s venue Turnberry, was launched officially by Jim Mather, the Minister for Enterprise, Energy and Tourism who unveiled both the printed materials and the new website http://www.scotlandswestscoastgolflinks.com/

Mr. Mather is pictured at VisitScotland’s showcase tourism industry event in Glasgow with the famous Claret Jug and the replica of the original Open Championship Belt first played for in 1860 at Prestwick. He said, “This is a great example of the golf industry working together in the current difficult economic times to attract visitors from across the world to our great country. Golf is a key theme of our Homecoming celebrations this year and the Open golf championship at Turnberry in July will bring thousands of golf fans to Scotland.

“Our Drive it Home initiative alone, which seeks to attract international golfers to Scotland for free rounds of golf at hundreds of courses across the country, has the potential to attract more than 8,000 golfers to Scotland, creating an additional £14.3 million in income for the Scottish economy. The Drive It Home campaign has already seen 3,200 potential tee times snapped up with golfers from across the world registering for a four-ball every five minutes.”

The golf course group have come together to promote the strength in depth of courses on the stretch of Ayrshire coastline between Irvine and Turnberry.

Ian Bunch, secretary of Prestwick Golf Club was delighted to see the group being launched, “The level of co-operation between the courses since the idea was first discussed has been excellent and simply by working together we are certain that we can improve the golf product on offer and the profile of Ayrshire as a golfing destination par excellence. It is already well known for hosting The Open at both Turnberry and Troon but by bringing together ten links courses of almost unmatchable quality in depth we hope to increase not only rounds played but see a clear increase in bed nights and secondary spends.”

To achieve this, the group has created a marketing plan that involves not only the courses but the accommodation and transport providers and food and drink providers across the area.
Hotelier Stuart Watt from Troon’s South Beach Hotel was equally delighted with the initiative, “The area needs this really badly and it’s such a positive move in an Open Championship year. Ayrshire needs to promote its quality golf offering and this collection of courses allows us as a hotel to really lift the golf product we offer quite dramatically.”

Whilst the group is focusing on marketing the quantity and quality of golf on offer within the 22 mile radius it is also looking forward to developing new collaborative product and using the internet to create a strong relationship with both the golf visitor and the travel trade. The message is not just being left to sit passively on its website, but is being supplemented by a host of add ons, with the group already having launched its own blog, newsfeeds and dynamic content.

Representatives of Scotland’s West Coast Golf Links were pictured not only with the Championship Trophy but also a replica of the original Belt which was first played for at Prestwick in 1860. 2010 sees the 150th anniversary of the first Open Championship played over the Ayrshire links and it is expected that the anniversary will act as the catalyst for a pilgrimage to the links golf courses of the West Coast of Scotland.