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About Elite Hotels

Almost 30 years ago, the student home Forum in Stockholm was built on the initiative of Bicky Chakraborty, with the goal to create a venue where Swedish and foreign students could meet. Few could then imagine that this would be the start of a journey towards a successful hotel chain, which today is called Elite Hotels, represented in 30 locations around Sweden and consists of appreciated quality hotels that house both weekend and business travelers as well as family gatherings. Over the years, Elite Hotels has received several awards for their fine work, in 2019 they received the award for the "Nordic's best hotel chain".

Background

At Elite Hotels, the experience is always in focus and each hotel has its own history and special character where the classic style of the old preserved town hotels is mixed with the urban and modern. The importance of creating the right impression and feeling is something that is not only visible in the hotel's physical environment, but is equally important when developing the company's digital channels.

Many years ago, when Star Republic was given the opportunity to work with Elite Hotels, we soon realized that we had the exact same ambition. Together, we began our journey through a first maintenance take-over to the existing website, which with equal focus on technology and design provides the visitor with the same experience, regardless of whether it takes place in a physical or digital environment.

Insights

Elite Hotel's website is built on Episerver CMS with integrations with the hotel's separate booking system where the transactions are done. However, gift card sales are handled entirely through the CMS, which has a unique integration towards a payment solution tailor-made for that very purpose. Work on improving functionality is ongoing with a well established “Scrum light” approach and close cooperation with team members meeting on a weekly basis.

Solution

In order to ensure that the digital experience is in line with the physical, Elite Hotels, in addition to the technical work, also prioritizes design and UX. In conjunction with a redesign of the digital channels, we were given the opportunity to review the existing site and break it down into smaller parts, so-called components. All graphic guidelines and components developed were gathered in a common place that became the design system for Elite Hotel's website.

The design system makes it easier to find and combine different components when building new functionality. For example, a form may consist of several components that can usually be reused in different ways for different purposes on different parts of the site. Working component-wise is smart given the opportunity to reuse already built functionality, which allows you to save both time and money and create a consistent experience throughout the site.

In order to facilitate its editors and find more efficient working methods, Elite Hotels chose to extend its design system to include the social media channels. The system we built consists of existing tools and is platform independent, adapted to last over time and to create a red thread in all the material Elite Hotels produce in social media. Templates of various kinds are worked out by Star Republic's designers, going through the design program Figma to the tool Zero Heights and then landing in Adobe Spark where the client's work is done before publication. A convenient way to ensure the right layout while there are good opportunities to customize the templates for each hotel.