Improve 'look-to-book' conversions and increase revenues

How do you find 120 million customers each year to stay in 535,000 guest rooms in 100 countries? If you’re InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), the largest hotel firm in the world, you do things first, and you do things right. IHG is an e-commerce industry leader, being the first to offer online reservations in the hotel industry, and the first to enable customers to review, cancel, or modify reservations online regardless of the origin of the reservation. How can you support a high level of functionality for such a large and geographically dispersed user group? And they did it right by choosing Akamai.

IHG recognized early that customers equated its ability to deliver excellent service online with its ability to provide great guest experiences in the hotels themselves. So deploying Akamai to ensure flawless functionality of booking applications and customer support tools was part of a larger strategy to ensure excellence throughout all operational areas. Akamai EdgeSuite produced immediate, measurable improvements in page download time, transaction processing speed, and overall site availability. This ensured that users could easily take advantage of enhanced site functionality, richer content about the company’s hotels, and useful personalization enhancements that make travel management more convenient. Optimized site performance and availability also led to significant improvements in both IHG’s online “look-to-book” conversion rate and total annual online revenue generated from its branded online sites—all thanks to Akamai.