Interview: How Mandarin Oriental Increased Direct Bookings Online
In 2018, Mandarin Oriental went through a re-platforming and changed their localization processes. Discover how they were able to increase direct bookings on their global sites through a collaboration with TransPerfect in an interview conducted with Mandarin Oriental's VP of Digital & E-Commerce, Jamie Cole. Watch the full interview here.
Full transcript of the interview:
Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group is renowned for creating unique hotels with distinctive design – our mantra is to truly surprise and delight our guests.
A multilingual experience is absolutely critical for us, it’s very much part of our DNA to have this multinational, multicultural capability but doing that on digital platforms is becoming increasingly important.
We partnered with Mandarin Oriental on a project they had for a digital transformation of their whole online experience. They have properties currently in over 21 countries. One of the big challenges for us is making sure that we were localizing the sites into a sufficient number of languages that could realistically support all the different guests from all the different markets around the world.
We’ve found that we’re engaging increasingly with guests both before they stay but also when they stay with us. Probably the key goal, really, is to provide a connected, seamless, digital experience for our guests across all brand touch-points. And so one of the main parts of that, before they stay with us, is how they interact with us through the website and the website channels.
TransPerfect is a best in class solution which helps to automate that process, taking out the complexity, and ensuring the quality of translation across our digital platforms. TransPerfect’s technology has proved really important to us, we had a difficult process before and now our workflow is much simpler and much quicker and our translated content is better quality.
They had antiquated content on the site that was not reflective of the brand and they were trying to have a much more easy to use digital experience which required complete re-platform across their entire stack. And so we were a component of that with provision of GlobalLink, our globalization management system, which integrated into the different marketing systems they were onboarding as part of this initiative and allowed them to automate a lot of the processes that they wanted to setup to, again, create a much more responsive, localized digital experience for their guests.
Having the really excellent translated, localized content on the website means that we can confidently market in other countries and direct people to our brand website, in local language, and know they’re going to have a great experience of our brand and be able to book in that language. So it’s been a key success factor for us. Our key measure is how many bookings we get online and we’ve seen a very significant growth. In fact, this year we are already 22% ahead of same time last year.
I think when we define success for the project coming out of it the main thing is the increase in direct bookings that Mandarin Oriental was able to see from these relaunched sites and I think our ability to bring experience and to understand what are the factors that you need to look at to successfully launch a project like this, how do you bring it in on budget, on time, and how do you set it up so that not only does it launch successfully but it’s structured in such a way that it can flourish over time.
Mandarin Oriental trusts TransPerfect as a partner for a number of reasons. I’ve been in the industry a long time and I’ve seen the success of other companies that have used TransPerfect services, for us, however, the attention to quality and detail and the relationship that we’ve had during the process is fundamental to our success and our service offering.
