The Leela Palaces Hotels and Resorts offer luxurious five star deluxe accommodations throughout India. Rare Medium’s challenge was to extend the brand to a new website, offering rich content, streamlined navigation, and immersive and experiential design. To kick off this project, the Rare Medium team interviewed stakeholders, conducted focus groups and toured the hotels to gain insights that would translate into the website’s visual design. The resulting luxury site crafts “The New Face of India”, represented in large, beautiful hotel and lifestyle imagery. The Leela’s website redesign is rich, elegant, luxurious, powerful, feminine, modern, and accentuates forward-looking design elements.
Importantly, the reservations process is front and center, offering consumers an intuitive way to select a hotel, designate the length of stay and number of rooms, and quickly check availability. Opera Web Services (OWS) was implemented for online booking and real-time availability, cross selling premium services like Spa and Dining and upgrade opportunities for suites, flowers, chocolates, and other delights.
Each hotel is easy to find through clear navigation and each hotel’s site enthusiastically invites consumers to interact and get to know the hotel and its people. Among the special features of The Leela website redesign is the addition of over 1,000 specially shot images to showcase the hotel facilities, from guestrooms to meeting rooms and everything in between. Visitors to the site gain a “sense of place” through this immersive mix of hotel and lifestyle imagery. New content for Offers, Dining, Spa, Weddings and Meetings provide quick overviews and bring pertinent information up several levels, keeping users on a single page. The use of concise, short, and targeted copy helps deliver a user-friendly site that is community focused. The large screen resolution combined with rich technologies pushes interactivity to provide a cutting edge experience that thinks beyond “now”, and looks forward towards tomorrow – putting The Leela at the forefront of authentic Indian luxury. Social Media integration sets the stage for guests to interact with the website and post “likes” and “tweets” from various pages. These features serves all markets; consumers benefit as much as travel agents and meeting planners.
