Data-driven digital growth for award-winning holiday platform

Gites is a customer with an award-winning holiday platform with which we have been achieving great results for years. In 2019, Gites.com won the Zoover Award for the 6th time in the category 'best holiday home provider'. An achievement that we are both proud of. Even though the website is solid, we continue to develop the business model, the UX and the underlying technology based on data and promote the brand. In this way, more and more people find a holiday home in France and Gites strengthens its position in the market.

 

 Case highlights

•  Since 2015 Gites has received 6 Zoover Awards as 'best holiday home provider'
•  Growth of the business model to a full-service platform on which all transactions take place
•  A better user experience by using a headless web application
•  Link with Exact Online
•  10% more conversion thanks to optimised email flows
•  In 3 months we reached 300,000 millennials with online campaigns and 19,000 millennials visited the website thanks to Instagram and Facebook ads

Put Gites even better on the map

How do you continue to develop with a customer who has already achieved success through a long collaboration and who is known among his primary target group? This luxury position offers us the opportunity to put Gites, as a brand, bigger and better on the map. A move like this is also essential due to competition from parties such as Airbnb that has arisen in recent years. We innovated the Gites business model into a full-service platform that takes care of all transactions. In addition, we use this freedom to create more and more user-friendly solutions, so that users find a gîte that suits them. There are also opportunities to increase brand awareness and conversion. Since content is important, we focus on rewriting articles to help vacationers get inspiration for their trip.

Creative solutions and close cooperation

These conceptual issues include creative solutions that are data-based and fit Gites' identity. Our designers, copywriters and digital marketers regularly brainstorm to make new plans. This is how ideas for social media campaigns arose, with which we increase the brand awareness of Gites among millennials. In addition, we decided that the e-mail flow could be more user-friendly and should provide more information about a booking. The solutions devised also included optimising flows on the website and making certain parts headless. In this way we improve the performance of the website and the interaction for the user is further optimised. In the meantime, our developers are working on a spam filter that intercepts messages from providers that contain illegal transactions (outside Gites.com) based on machine learning.

A more user-friendly experience

Thanks to the combined forces of our digital marketers, designers, copywriters and developers, we have realised a suitable solution for every challenge. With an Instagram and Facebook campaign we bring Gites as a brand to the attention of millennials. This guess-the-place campaign shows photos of unique places in France without mentioning where they were taken. Users can then click through to a landing page to discover the answer. In addition, we are currently making the first YouTube advertisements, which will reach an even wider audience, proposing the different kinds of houses you can book through Gites. And with the optimised email flow, we show how safe and easy it is to book a holiday rental with Gites, so users don't have to worry about it.

More brand awareness and trust

Thanks to the Instagram and Facebook campaigns, we have achieved great results: in 3 months more than 300,000 millennials were introduced to Gites. In addition, more than 19,000 millennials visited the website. With the improved email flows, Gites now makes it clear, among other things, that payment is safe and holidaymakers receive extra information about their booking. This is good for a 10% increase in conversion. In addition to these resounding figures, Gites has been winning the Zoover Award for best holiday home provider for 6 years in a row. Hard work is therefore rewarded: on to even more prizes and conversions!