Shillingford Bridge Hotel
"It’s an excellent form of advertising that has brought us great exposure, and best of all a new and growing client base."
About Shillingford Bridge Hotel
The Shilingford Bridge Hotel is situated near the River Thames in the old market town of Wallingford. The hotel has 40 en-suite bedrooms, some with river views, and all with complimentary Wi-Fi. Overlooking the surrounding grounds, the hotel restaurant offers an extensive a la carte menu accompanied by a fine list of wines. The car park offers convenience on arrival and departure. A popular Oxfordshire wedding venue, the nearby river makes the perfect backdrop for post-nuptial photos.
The Challenge
When the Shillingford Bridge Hotel joined the St James Group of Hotels it received new investment to improve the property, along with a new requirement to improve and introduce awareness of the hotel back into the local community. The main objectives were to re-invigorate food and beverage sales, and give customer footfall a boost.
The Result
It’s not just topline sales that have seen a big improvement from the hotel’s partnership with Groupon. Rob has seen better engagement from the local community, and has enjoyed improvement in numbers of repeat guests. Rob says: “I can honestly say we now retain 20-30% of guests directly. Alongside this we have had a number of functions, meetings, dinners and weddings book with us and the value of these events over the up and coming 18-24 months is worth over £100k.”
When it comes to boosting the hotel’s quiet periods, the Groupon partnership has produced some fantastic results. The first quarter of the year is notoriously the most difficult for the Hotel, as it is with many hotels. To counteract this, Rob ran back-to-back and overlapping promotions on Groupon such as afternoon teas, brunches, and two and three-course dinners. Again, the hotel was delighted with the results which produced over 1000 sales to boost revenue going into the first period. Rob says: “Revenue for what is typically our most difficult quarter was in excess of £14k, with additional upsell from Groupon guests taking the total to £17k. This, combined with the additional business over this period gave our first quarter a fantastic revenue boost.”
"The Groupon team has always been very responsive to my needs, productive in terms of what they’ve done for the hotel, and we’ve found the whole experience to be very profitable."
- Rob Carr, Sales Manager
