How Mandarin Oriental digitalized its luxury hotel experience

Every CX practitioner knows that digital-first personalized journeys are an essential element of omnichannel CX. But how can they be tailored to industries that specialize in the luxury, in-person experience?

Asia-Pacific hotel chain Mandarin Oriental set out to answer this question as it prepared to capture a greater share of the post-pandemic travel market. Established in 1963 in Hong Kong, the brand promises to “delight and inspire fans at every opportunity” and has built a global reputation for service excellent and fine dining.

But even in luxury travel, most customer journeys begin online and Mandarin Oriental required a unified, unique experience across both physical and digital channels.

The brand already had a successful app and desktop site, but this project required its signature luxury touches to be digitalized and introduced earlier in the guest’s journey.

The project had several strategic aims:

1. Add mobile-first options throughout the customer journey.
2. Provide a unified and unique experience across both physical properties and digital touchpoints.
3. Increase engagement with guests on digital platforms.
4. Allow guests a pathway to connect with individual properties across multiple channels.
5. Drive greater personalization across the entire journey.

An initial relaunch of the brand’s digital presence started with a website refresh in 2021 to target the first post-pandemic travel surge. The results of this early work were incredibly encouraging, with Mandarin Oriental seeing a 10 percent increase in guest engagement behavior.

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Designing multi-channel multi-device journeys

In early 2023, the brand announced the “grand relaunch” of its website, which now offers multimedia content, virtual property tours, price matching, hyper-personalization and integrated communications with individual properties across multiple channels, not just web.
Because many guests use smartphones throughout the booking journey as well as during their stay, the enhanced digital experience is mobile first, which “highlights the same luxury and customer-first approach [guests] expect from our hotels,” according to Peter Norris, VP of digital at Mandarin Oriental.

Norris adds: “Our improved user experience allows customers to more seamlessly engage with our website based on their travel intent. Our post-implementation analytics are reflecting easier navigation, a lower bounce rate and more page views as a result.”

Early numbers from the full relaunch show a year-on-year increase of 91 percent in organic traffic, 17 percent in unique visitors and 42 percent in revenue from online bookings.

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Crafting luxury digital experiences

Before adding these functions, Mandarin Oriental conducted a number of studies into what its guests want in an online experience. It learned that layout and visual appeal were top factors and through its new platforms Mandarin Oriental is using photography to establish an emotional connection with guests.

Christoph Oberli, vice president of ecommerce and interactive for Mandarin Oriental, New York, says: “The site has been designed to offer a clean, simple and visually appealing journey with rich content and ease of booking. MandarinOriental.com has been redesigned to the highest possible standards as befits a luxury brand, and in keeping with our projected future growth.”
The simplistic, multimedia homepage links to individual pages for each property, organized by region and city for easy navigation. While the homepage sets the luxury tone, the property pages allow guests to pre-explore rooms and property facilities in detail as part of their booking experience. In turn, individual properties can manage local content.

Mandarin Oriental has even brought a luxury touch to self-service. The MO Explore feature allows guests to self-book dinners, spa therapies and even “functional movement” treatments at properties around the world. As users navigate the tiles they can browse images, availability, opening times, contact details, prices and booking forms for each individual experience, within a few clicks of the homepage.

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Catering to the individual

Mandarin Oriental’s loyalty program is called Fans of MO – a take on the fan in the MO logo. It launched in 2018 and rather than awarding points and tiers, it rewards guests for booking directly with the hotel by offering perks for each stay. This can include everything from faster online booking to member-only experiences.

In refreshing its digital channels, Mandarin Oriental is facilitating stronger personalization by allowing guests to create online profiles that can transfer personal information into all Mandarin Oriental stays and individualize their entire journey across channels and devices.

The guest data collected through MO accounts is shared with properties ahead of arrival and guests have the option to make additional requests. The new digital capabilities carry this data across devices and touch points to inform hotel associates of individual preferences at every step.

Norris says: “Most of us have come to expect a minimum level of personalization from the companies and brands we engage with and our guests are of course no exception.

“Personalization, in essence, allows us to recognize our guests’ individual needs, wants and interests, in order to create a digital experience that feels tailor-made for them. Mandarin Oriental prides itself on delivering thoughtful, curated, singular experiences at each of our hotels and we wanted our website to recreate the feeling our guests have when they interact with any one of our dedicated hotel concierges and other colleagues. Personalization was a key piece to ensuring the website reflected the same extraordinary service we provide on property,” he adds.

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Training customers for new experiences

Many brands and organizations add features to their user experience (UX) that have been introduced to other digital customer experiences and are understood by consumers around the world. Occasionally, however, a brand innovates its CX or UX to introduce a totally new capability.

When releasing new features, particularly on digital channels, it is important to eliminate friction, which can easily occur when a customer does not know how a new function works and cannot figure it out intuitively.

Elsewhere in the travel space, Delta Airlines provides a great example of this and has rolled out a number of new customer technologies and features in recent years. Delta was the first airline to install Gate Informational Display Screens in airports, the first to offer live broadcast television in-flight and the first to offer online booking, inflight Wi-Fi and tracked baggage.
On how its customers managed to keep up with these changes, Shep Hyken, chief amazement officer at Hyken Productions, says: “It trained them to use new features.”

He adds: “When there is change…we have to train our customers on the new expectation that we can provide them.”

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Adding the luxury touch

According to CX authority Chip Bell, there are elements of the luxury experience that any non-luxury brand can incorporate in its CX.

Bell says: “One of my favourite brands out there is Kimpton Hotel & Restaurant Group, part of IHG Hotels & Resorts. Kimpton does a lot of novel things for its customers and to do that it brought elements of a luxury experience to the Kimpton brand experience.

He adds: “If the most expensive hotel in the world is US$3,000 a night, what is that experience and are there features of that which can be brought to Kimpton?”

When doing this, Bell says practitioners and experience designers should look beyond their own sectors to become leaders, rather than fast-followers.

He says: “Look outside your world. Are there lessons to learn from other environments that may be completely different in terms of the customers they serve that is applicable to what we do? Do not watch you competition, look beyond your competition, sector or industry and innovate on other ideas.”

To enable its new luxury online experience, Mandarin Oriental re-platformed its website and called on a number of external specialists throughout the project. As the early figures demonstrate, however, the investment is paying dividends for Mandarin Oriental while driving the standard of digital CX across the travel and hospitality industry.