Crest Hotels Group

Overview

Crest Hotels Group is a collection of nine hotels across England and Wales — from Arnos Manor in Bristol to the Imperial in Tenby, the Metropole in Llandrindod Wells and Park House in Shifnal. Hotels, venues, spas, weddings and restaurants, all under one group, all needing a website that actually fills rooms.

We design and develop the lot. Not nine one-off websites, but one shared platform that runs every property and the group site on top — each hotel with its own brand and personality, all powered by a single system we built and maintain. When Crest takes on a new hotel, its website isn’t a six-week headache; it’s a skin on a platform that already works.

The challenge

A hotel group is only as strong as its weakest website — and Crest’s estate had grown into a mismatched set of sites. Every hotel looked different, behaved differently and was a job to update. There was no shared brand thread tying the group together, and no easy way to bring a new property online.

Worse, the sites weren’t doing the one job that pays the bills: getting guests to book direct. Every booking that goes through an OTA like Booking.com hands over a chunk of commission — money straight off the bottom line. A clunky booking journey doesn’t just annoy guests; it quietly pushes them back to the booking sites and away from the hotel’s own pocket.

What we did

We stopped treating it as a pile of separate websites and built Crest a proper platform.

One theme, every brand

We designed and built a unified website theme that deploys across all of their properties. Each hotel keeps its own identity — its own crest, colours and character — but underneath they all share one consistent, maintainable system. The group stops paying to solve the same problem nine times, and every site benefits when we improve the platform once.

Built to fill rooms, not OTAs

Every site leads with Book Direct, the booking engine wired in and front-and-centre, so guests reserve with the hotel instead of drifting off to a commission-charging third party. And because the estate is joined up — every site carries a “Find Another Crest Hotel” thread — a guest looking at one property can discover the rest of the group.

A new hotel, online without the headache

The real payoff is speed. When Crest add a property, we’re not starting from a blank page — we stand up a new site on the existing platform, brand it, and it’s live. Growth stops being a digital bottleneck.

Ongoing consultancy

It doesn’t end at launch. We advise Crest on new digital product and where to take the estate next — the consultancy half of a long-running partnership, not a one-off build.

Results

One tidy platform now runs an entire hotel group, and the brand finally hangs together across every property.

• Over 750,000 visits a year across the estate’s websites.
• Every hotel is growing. Each property with a full year of data is up year-on-year — Park House +28%, Almondsbury +21%, Tiverton +21%, The Feathers +19%, Arnos Manor +12%.
• A new hotel can be online in weeks, not months — a new site is stood up on the existing platform and branded, not built from scratch. Growth stops being a digital bottleneck.
• Every site leads with Book Direct, steering guests to reserve with the hotel instead of a commission-charging OTA.

The whole group now runs on one system, looks sharp across every property, and pulls three-quarters of a million visits a year.