Marketing solutions for your hotel website

Hôtel Le Clos Saint-Louis in Quebec City, Canada

When we sat down with Ghislaine Donais, the owner of the 18-room luxury hotel located in the the heart of Old Québec, she was looking to upgrade her outdated simple English and French-language website and increase the pool of potential clients. 

Compared with the original website, the new pages that we designed for Le Clos integrated more visual elements, including professionally shot photos and expertly designed Flash animation files. We sought to maintain the website’s original mix of deep yellow, burgundy red and café brown shades, at the same time, enhancing the website’s delicate aesthetic appearance by choosing a subtle tea set pattern, highlighting the distinct characteristics of the hotel.

We extended the prospect base for the hotel by adding Spanish, Italian, Simplified and Traditional Chinese-language versions of the site. With Chinese now the third most spoken language across Canada, attested by large Chinese communities in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal, and with the number of Chinese speakers having already surpassed the number of French speakers across Canada outside of Quebec, adding Chinese is an ahead of the curve move for this client. Feedback from the owner tells us that, within weeks of launching the site, Chinese Canadians have been calling and booking rooms in the hotel.

Luxe French Living in Paris, France

The owner of the Luxe French Living site was seeking to reach a targeted and well defined audience: moneyed individuals from the recently formed middle class in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing, who see themselves as apart from the rest of Chinese society by virtue of their new found fortunes.  We needed a site that would not only set it widely apart from the typical highly cluttered sites that abound in the Chinese community, but also appeal to their recently cultivated appreciation and admiration of all things French.  After meeting with Barney Lehrer, the client representative and manager of the project, the solution that we agreed upon was a simple yet elegant site that would contrast sharply with the websites the target audience was used to visiting while appealing to their refined tastes.

We adopted a holistic Flash animation approach for the entire Luxe French Living site, with its original simple static pictures converted to Flash files in line with the client’s concept. Pictures and text on the site are displayed with various animation effects, rendering the new site distinctly more vivid and attractive to visitors compared with the original version.

The Luxe French Living site uses ActionScript/Flex technology, which enables Flash animation files that change based on how the visitor navigates the site. Content in the Flash files can be modified in real time through the site’s back-end CMS functionality.