Background
Our client is a hospitality investor who had recently acquired a 28-room boutique property in the Channel Islands. The property had a tired brand, no functioning website beyond a placeholder page, and no direct-booking channel; existing bookings came almost exclusively through OTAs at high commission rates. The acquisition had completed in late February; the client wanted the rebranded property live and taking direct bookings for the summer booking window, which effectively meant a hard deadline of mid-May.
What we did
Brand. A six-week brand sprint covering naming, positioning, visual identity, photography direction, and tone of voice. The strategic positioning landed on quiet-luxury for European weekenders — a different competitive frame than the family-leisure positioning that dominates the Channel Islands category. The visual identity was deliberately understated: a single-letter mark, a tight type system, a colour palette built around the property’s natural stonework.
Photography. A two-day shoot on the property capturing 200+ images across rooms, communal spaces, exteriors, food and drink, and lifestyle scenarios. The photography asset library has been the single most-used output of the engagement; it powers the website, the Performance Max creative, the social presence and the OTA listings (which we updated to align with the new brand).
Website. A Webflow build — deliberately chosen over WordPress for shipping speed and editorial flexibility. Eight pages plus a custom booking flow integrated with the property’s reservation system via Mews API. Server-side conversion firing, GA4, Google Tag Manager. Page-load budget of under 1.5 seconds on 4G, met across all pages.
Performance Max launch. One PMax campaign with three asset groups: high-intent searchers (audience signal: keywords, customer-list of past guests at sister properties), broad prospecting (audience signal: in-market for travel, custom segment based on competitor-property domains), and brand audience (audience signal: customer list, website visitors). Geo-targeted across the UK, Ireland, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany — the natural catchment for short-haul leisure travel to the Channel Islands.
Supporting paid social. A small Meta programme launched alongside PMax, primarily as a creative-testing layer; the photography assets we’d shot lent themselves better to feed-style social than to search creative.
The numbers
The property opened on the 12th of May with 74% of available room-nights for the opening month booked through direct channels at the time of opening — substantially ahead of the 50% direct-bookings target the investor had set. By end of summer, average review rating across the major OTAs and Tripadvisor stood at 4.8★. Direct bookings ran at 2.3× the volume forecast in the underwriting model for year one.
Lessons
The single largest contributor to direct-bookings velocity was the photography. Hospitality is a category where visual quality is the primary purchase driver; under-investing in photography to save 10% of the budget would have cost more than 50% of the bookings in our estimation.
The single decision we’d revisit: we ran the brand sprint and the website build in parallel rather than sequentially, which meant the website was built around a brand identity that wasn’t fully resolved until week five. The result was three rounds of revision on the website that we could have avoided. Sequencing brand-then-build adds two weeks but costs less calendar time overall.