Brief
As the UK’s leading health and wellness destination brand, Champneys operates six elegant countryside resorts and hotels, from Health Resorts at Champneys Tring, the UK’s original health spa, Forest Mere in Hampshire, Henlow in Bedfordshire and Springs in Leicestershire; to more recent hotel acquisitions at Eastwell Manor in Kent and Mottram Hall, Cheshire – Champneys first spa and golf resort.
Champneys wanted to bring all their properties together under a consistent brand architecture and a single website, which could articulate the new hotel propositions – afternoon teas, fine dining, weddings and golf - alongside the existing Champneys Health Spa experience.
Solution
Working together with Champneys we re-thought the relationship between the heath resorts and hotels with spas, positioning the Health Resort Spas as ‘the ultimate robed experience’ and the Hotels with Health Spas as ‘luxury hotels that go beyond spa’.
Before the two new hotels could be integrated into a single website, we needed to visually align them with the Champneys brand, but avoid compromising their individual heritage. We retained the ‘Mottram Hall’ and ‘Eastwell Manor’ names but expanded the Champneys brand to include a new logo lock up for each hotel.
With the brand architecture unified we could bring all the properties together, designing an intuitive information architecture and UX to allow users to view all the properties, but also focus on individual propositions.
Each hotel or resort has a unique header with customised sub navigation, providing useful differentiation between the properties. The Health Spa pages are light and bright and the Hotels & Health Spas have a moodier styling. Each features extensive photography and an illustration inspired by the local landscape.
The essence of Champneys’ brand look and feel was retained, but we expanded the brand tool kit to include new colourways and typography, ensuring that all elements were correctly optimised for web.
A new editorial-inspired ‘Top 10’ module allows Champneys to communicate the breadth and depth of their proposition and dial up experiences according to the season. This combined with cleverly integrated social media throughout the site to keep content fresh.
The booking journey was also revised, simplifying the way users search for availability across multiple properties, and how rates and spa packages are displayed. The simplicity of the new user experience hides the complexity of a bespoke integration with the back-end resort management system, ResortSuite.
The website has been designed using bespoke building blocks carefully crafted to work together in any combination and all managed in the Kentico CMS content management system. The new digital platform offers Champneys complete flexibility when building new pages and provides for easy updates and future-proofing.
Results
Using our agile software development method, the site was designed, developed and released in time for the start of the 2021 booking season.
Kate Taylor, Champneys Marketing Director congratulated Nucleus, saying “We are delighted with our new brand architecture and website, it feels really fresh and brings all our offerings to life under the Champneys umbrella, while showcasing the uniqueness of each location. We are confident that this investment in digital will pay dividends in 2021 and beyond.”
www.champneys.com