CUSTOMER STORYElevating hotel search to create destination experiences.

To be the top travel and leisure company worldwide, one well-known hotel brand reinvented itself—starting with its website.

Food is a focal point of travel. Foodies cross the globe in search of that perfect bite or exotic flavor. An international hotel with a household name wanted to capitalize on this and use its restaurants to grow its recognition in hospitality markets where it was less established. While hotel restaurants aren’t typically known as gourmand destinations, this family of hotels houses more than two dozen Michelin-star restaurants at its properties.

More than just a place to stay

Familiar to travelers searching for a comfortable place to stay, this hotel chain encompasses 30 different brands with over 7,000 locations worldwide. While it maintained a strong lead in the business travel market, disruptive companies like Airbnb and VRBO were making a growing dent in the leisure travel segment. Its market share of personal getaways was beginning to slip away.

Despite generating nearly $13 billion in annual revenue from its restaurants and offering golf packages and other recreational experiences, only lodging was included in its website search. The hotel needed to change the perception that all it offers are rooms.

Outdated search technology holding back innovation

The hotel’s website search ran on an Endeca platform, a once best-in-class search engine that had seen better days. At end-of-life and not updated in years, the stagnant search platform meant the hotel couldn’t take advantage of all the benefits progressive search engines offer.

The biggest hindrance was the inability to understand user intent behind search queries. Natural language and long-tail searches resulted in missed opportunities rather than connections. There was no personalization, property order was presented strictly as a function of distance, and customer reviews weren’t mined for sentiment analysis.

By replacing Endeca with a modern search engine backed by machine learning, its website’s search and discovery capabilities would be dramatically improved and could be used to showcase its restaurants and drive growth in the leisure travel market.

A fresh start after pandemic challenges

The path to better search wasn’t straightforward. An initial partnership with Microsoft Bing went awry, and then the pandemic hit. But by November 2020, as people began to peek out from under the covers into a new normal, the hotel knew it was time to act.

The hotel predicted that people itching to get back out into the world would create rapid post-pandemic growth in the leisure travel market. All the more reason to fight for its share of vacationers with modern website capabilities designed to delight and satisfy their desires.

Starting with food and beverage

To dip its toe in the water, the hotel decided to restart the overhaul of its website by breaking restaurant and dining options into a customized search experience. The hotel chose Lucidworks as a partner, enticed by the sophisticated query-intent-understanding capabilities of its search engine.

Starting with a request for a location, the food and beverage search built by Lucidworks shows all restaurants housed at the hotel’s properties within the area. The restaurants can be filtered by cuisine type to help find the style of dish you’re craving. Results are displayed as a list with a picture offering a peek inside the restaurant, a short description, and additional information like hours and contact details.

Everything feels clean, inviting, and easy to navigate.

The high-stakes demo

The launch of the food and beverage search was such a success that confidence grew in the partnership with Lucidworks. When the hotel decided it was time to upgrade its leisure-travel hotel reservation portal, it looked to Lucidworks again.

During one product demo, a hotel executive requested Lucidworks execute a search for a specific hotel brand name “in Austin with free wifi and indoor pool for less than 250.” The executive made it clear: if Lucidworks search couldn’t understand the query’s intent, there was no reason to move forward.

As the team typed the query into the demo search box, the search system performed impressively:

• It recognized the brand name and filtered properties accordingly
• It understood “Austin” as a city location
• It recognized “free wifi and indoor pool” as desired amenities
• It interpreted “less than 250” as a price constraint

The system delivered exactly the flexible search experience the hotel had hoped to provide its travelers.

Inspiring wanderlust with recommendations

Before engaging with Lucidworks, there were no recommendations on the hotel’s website and very confined ways to look for lodging. Now, Lucidworks drives the recommendations engine that populates the hotel’s homepage.

“Trending offers” and “most viewed properties” whet the appetite for unanticipated destinations, enticing recreational travelers to daydream on the website and book at its properties when the dream becomes reality.

From hotel to destination

With new recommendations and dining search catering to foodies and vacationers, and upgraded property search on track, the hotel is transforming how travelers perceive its brand. Flexible website search and recommendations offering more to discover are just the first steps for the hotel to showcase all the experiences it provides.

The next frontier is implementing Lucidworks Smart Answers to improve chatbot capabilities that will reduce the high volume of customer phone calls and provide faster service.

Soon, when travelers want an easy, all-in-one destination for high-quality cuisine, a round of golf, and a nice place to stay, this hotel chain aims to be the first name they think of—not just as a place to sleep, but as a complete destination experience.

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By renovating the company’s website search to better understand natural language queries and customer intent, a major hotel chain has transformed its digital presence from merely booking rooms to showcasing its full range of experiences—proving that in today’s competitive hospitality market, intelligent search is the key to becoming a true destination.