case study

The Tschuggen Collection

Re-platforming one of Switzerland’s leading luxury hotel groups.

The Tschuggen Collection is a leading group of 5-star luxury Swiss hotels. Baytree was chosen to architect, design and develop a new digital platform for their corporate site and four hotel properties. The client team wanted to totally redesign their websites to reflect their new brand identity and support the launch of a unique customer experience program. The brief was to create a timeless and sophisticated design that connected all 5 brands in their portfolio yet allowed them to stand apart as unique iconic properties. Critical to the project was delivering a single content hub that allowed the digital team to better manage their content across the sites. This project also saw us migrate 5 distinct URL’s to a single instance – massively simplifying the customer journey and cross driving sales within the group.

what we did
  • Business analysis and digital strategy

  • Discovery & user research

  • Site mapping and concepting

  • Responsive-web design

  • Acquisition integration

  • Web application development

  • Headless CMS development (Contentul)

  • Technical SEO scoping and implementation

  • Cloud based infrastructure set up and deployment

outcomes
  • A single Headless CMS content hub managing 5 unique sites

  • 100% responsive web platform accessible across devices

  • SEO migration and mapping of over 3,000 URL to new site schema

  • Increased performance and security

  • Set the foundation for personalized marketing content and the build out of a guest experience application

  • Deployed cost effective Azure cloud hosting dramatically reducing hosting costs for the client

  • 0 operational incidents requiring a fix to the infrastructure since launch - 100% uptime

The Technical details

We picked Contentful for the project. This headless CMS gives the digital team a huge amount of flexibility with their publishing needs and acts as an integrator throughout their workflow chain. Contentful also provides a single-entry point: technical implementation, application maintenance, roll-out, and complete managed services with 24/7 automated server supervision in a Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure that we also deployed.

3 Big Takeaways
Reposition the brand online

A core aim for the project was to create an online experience that matched up to the fantastic on property experience delivered to guest that stay at a Tshcuggen Collection hotel. This meant reimagining and going beyond what is expected from a hotel website, just like the staff at the hotels do everyday for their gusts. We focussed on a sleek, ambitious design that innovates with on page booking which means users are not opening new web browsers to complete their booking journey.

Refining legacy content

As part of our audit of the existing hotels, we need to sift through over a decade of legacy content that had been added to the sites with little thought of the overall picture. This had resulted in a lack of coherence and consistency. We worked the hotels refine and remove content so that it was much more manageable and relevant to their audiences. It’s never easy taking collateral away from sales teams and good stake holder management was critical to this process. Ultimately, data was our friend here. By researching historic site analytics we were able to show the % of pages receiving little to no traffic despite there prominence in user experience flow. This data also allowed us to uncover hidden gems in the old sites that were actively being sort out by users but that were buried in the site flows.

Respond to technical challenges

Due to the sheer size of the platform, the age of their legacy system(s) and the nature of the hotel business, we faced a large number of third party integrations and migrations. These challenges were met head on and involved liaising with third parties and working with incomplete information and data. Some of the partners we worked with included: From a complex DNS migration,

  • Google Analytics (Google Analytics 4)

  • GSC

  • GTM

  • IWAY

  • EuroDNS

  • E-Guma

  • HNS Web Booking Engine

  • Zendesk

  • Lunchgate/Foratable

We also needed to ensure we were compliant with Swiss data laws. Set up custom caching and CDN - allowing extremely fast load times despite huge surges of traffic for breaking/viral news stories, with pages being served from every users local CDN Point of presence - essential for improving performance with interntional customers. Built web browser based automated test suite to ensure the site is always working when any layout or page changes are made. Set up automatic deployments of code from CI/CD to azure - meaning any changes can be pushed to staging, tested, and then promoted to production in one or two clicks