Case study: Hotel Pelirocco

Case study: Hotel Pelirocco

PDF download free full Case Study: Hotel Pelirocco

An elina pms case study on Hotel Pelirocco - a boutique hotel on Brighton seafront, with twenty unique rooms and plenty of rock-n-roll spirit!

Pelirocco has consistently hit the headlines since opening its doors and has appeared in many PR publications from Moscow to Rio, from the Huffington Post to Elle magazine. Awarded ‘Brighton Independent Hotel of the year 2019’, the original rock ‘n’ roll Brighton boutique hotel has 19 unique rooms.

An elina customer since 2015 Hotel Pelirocco have been accommodating guests in style since the year 2000 with a team of over 20 including kitchen, front of house, management and a housekeeping. The hotel is listed on Booking.com as one of the top picks in Brighton & Hove, and have been welcoming Booking.com guests since 18 May 2010.

The rooms

Hotel Pelirocco is the original rock n roll Brighton boutique hotel, offering 19 individually themes bedrooms to choose from. The hotel is inspired by the best of pop’s subculture and maverick musicians, with the hallways a living testament of the energetic history of British rock and pop. Each boutique hotel rooms provides quirky and unusual vibes, with its own theme and many talking points for both during and after your stay.

Each room has its own character and personality along with quirk names e.g. Lovers Lair is their infamous flagship suite and ultimate destination for couples wanted a luxurious getaway.

Our favourite is the recent Koibito Love, with an en-suite Japanese bathing experience, a raised bamboo framed circular bed and a beautiful room murial.

Bar & restaurant

The lively restaurant on-site serves up free full English and buffet breakfast each morning in the bar area. Evenings and nights becomes alive with live music, unique selection of cocktails along with frequent DJ karaoke nights. Additional fee-only extras include in-room cupcakes, couples massages, and more.

The Location

In Regency Square, by the old pier on the seafront and the stunning i360 viewing tower, in the heart of Brighton – everything is within walking distance. This includes: Brighton Fishing Museum, The Royal Pavilion, Brighton railway station, Brighton Beach, Brighton Pier and the famous lanes.

The Business model

Keep things fresh! Renovating a room completely each year, ensuring that guests who love the hotel team, location and Brighton have something new to try, and the hotel always has a new room to promote to the hotels fans, alongside the other individually unique rooms.

A real focus on direct bookings online and via the phone, is supplemented by reservations from OTAs and coupon websites, advertising and local partnerships.

The locals in Brighton love hunting for opportunities for weekend breaks or cheeky mini getaways. They enjoy staying in the fun and vibrant areas Brighton has to offer.

Local companies who want good-for-the-soul accommodation close to their offices. Conference rooms with moorish coffee and tea breaks by the sea – business friendly!

Getting the most from elina

Marko, the GM, takes us through how elina software and services help Hotel Pelirocco with managing reservations and guests.

“Elina is at the heart of all hotel operations. It gives us total overall control of our reservations, promotions, correspondence, financial reporting and marketing. The software is innovative in helping us to customise and add to the experience of guests, and to create potential sales. All data is stored to be reviewable and everything is linked. It’s a one stop shop for all our hotel needs and I think its best quality is just that. We also find the regular webinars help us to understand the many different aspects of the software.”

How we use the dashboards to help                                                              

“First thing in the morning we come in and check all the arrivals, all the notes on bookings, and the orders, which shows us what is to be actioned that day. Using the today dashboard, is a focus for us – it’s one place we know that we can see everything that is going to happen in advance and prepare. So, when that when the guest arrives, they get our full attention, rather than us looking at screens and doing admin.

We can also view all the reservations made in the last day and double-check that every reservation that has been made has been fully actioned. This helps us to spot problems early.”

Personalised booking engine

The Smart.BE booking engine is the centre of making the website a direct bookings engine, with hooked up analytics enabling tracking on social media campaigns and Google AdWords spend.

“The booking engine covered our needs. We have individually themed rooms and we needed to do a little customisation, which the booking engine enabled. We added individual calendars for each unique room, which means that searches can be made across one room as well as across the hotel in general. Guests who know which room they want can check’ live availability for any future dates and book, or they can do a general results search if they are curious”

Delivering little extras that make a guests stay special

“Once we have a guest booking it’s important to offer products to make their experience the best possible. The delivery of a favourite cocktail, to birthday balloons and cakes can make this the best birthday ever. By offering add-ons through our site that can then be added in the checkout process or by staff to the booking it guarantees this can happen.

Properly recorded notes in elina, with which we add actions points to can ensure that little requests, such as non-feathered duvets extra pillows, are delivered, not missed, once requested.”

More direct guests is our goal

“We encourage people to book direct by offering its legendary breakfast free of charge on our website and over the phone, or email. This is a large slice of free. Its automatically attached to direct bookings only to make sure these customers are rewarded with a better deal.”

Targeted marketing

“At Hotel Pelirocco, we regularly runs promotions on individual rooms, to inspire people to come back and stay again. Whether it’s sending a mailer out to all the people who have stayed in one particular room to be reminded of their great stay and providing a booking discount or linking to a local exhibition (recent David Bowie photographic exhibition) we use the tools that are available through elina to refine our offers and target audience. Targeted offers we find, have a higher chance of success and people are happier to receive them. These go out to opted in for marketing guests.”

Pre-arrival contact

“The automated e-mails we have created through elina and that send out to guests are important in making sure they are prepared for their stay. Plus, it gets them excited about it in advance and then encouraging them to tell others on social media afterwards.”

Keep track of housekeeping

“The status of rooms can easily be seen within elina, meaning we can tell if rooms are ready for arrival or not. By linking housekeeping to elina we can refine the process to make sure the checking in process is as smooth as possible.”

Using the calendar for managing reservations

“There are a variety of options in for managing reservations. We like to work visually and the occupancy calendar enables us to quickly see availability and make bookings. For those who prefer lists they can switch to creating orders this way. It gives each person the chance to personalise their use of the booking calendar whilst achieving standard goals.

The calendar shows at a glance see how occupancy is looking, bookings unconfirmed and by hovering on bookings more details can be seen – which is helpful”

Website Performance & Google Adwords

Around a quarter of the website traffic comes from people who went straight to hotelpelirocco.co.uk, whilst just over 4 in 10 find the website from organic search. Elina digital marketing team set up Adwords and end to end tracking, and Google Adwords performs well with the average cost per click just £0.17.

Conversions rates on Adwords is around 1.8% of all website visitors, whilst organic search is 1.4% and direct website visitors, went straight to the domain from their browser, is 0.7%. Therefore the best conversion rate on people viewing to booking is through through Google Adwords. Hotel Pelirocco just focuses on pay per click on the brand name, so for example ‘hotel pelirocco brighton’ or ‘hotel pelirocco’. Website traffic is up 140% year on year through some simple changes and Adwords.

 “We have learned from Google Analytics syncing data to elina PMS booking engine and to Adwords, that more than 30% of our revenue is directly from Google Adwords and that overall the average order value on our website is over £200. Plus that our marketing mix including social media, referral websites, Adwords, all contribute to getting people to booking.”

Performance

Direct website revenue has always been over 25% since 2016 with the best year being in 2020, with 35% of reservations being booked on the Hotel Pelirocco website. Over 50 sources of bookings are tracked and reported on, showing the variety of booking sources.

Revenue from extra services or products sold has gone from 3.5 to 7% over the time, as more additional sales are generated on room bookings.

The summer of 2020 saw an average daily rate (ADR) of £141 and revenue earned per room per day (RevPAR) of £110, beating 2019 despite the obvious challenges, which was an ADR of £120 and RevPAR of £102. Up around 10% then and driven by direct demand with 43% of bookings stayed made on the official website.