Increasing Online Reservations within its Market Segment
Only minutes south of Camden Maine, and literally set a top a small ledge overlooking Penobscot Bay, the Ledges By The Bay is a 41-unit classic Maine motel with panoramic ocean views. Not content to keep doing business as usual, the Ledges By The Bay sought a way to expand their online presence to create stronger connections with potential customers and to increase their overall percentage of reservations booked online.

The Ledges By The Bay faced a double challenge as it began to expand its presence online. On the one hand, the website had to integrate with the Ledge's new online booking and reservation system, enabling real-time reservations and allowing potential customers to review and receive special pricing and room availability. On the other hand, the site had to distinctly convey the beauty and uniqueness of their property and waterfront location, without making the user experience too complicated by technical complexities frequently encountered during the integration process.

Integrating the Customer Experience and Raising the Bar for Online Visibility
In order to deliver on the high expectations set forth by the Ledges, Vont first spent a considerable amount of time understanding the customer behaviors and preferences of the Ledges' diverse customer base of new and returning visitors simply interested in learning more about the property and its amenities.

Our solution was an elegant new website powered by a remotely hosted ASP (Application Service Provider) Property Management System that enabled real-time reservations between the web application hosted at the ASP's data center and the Ledge's back-office Property Management System running on their internal network.

Additionally, the Ledges website was entirely redesigned to be more search engine friendly. Text on almost all pages was rewritten and optimized to reflect specifically targeted search and keyword phrases being used by visiting and potential customers to locate accommodations in Midcoast Maine. Vont identified a number of search terms that have helped drive traffic to the motel's website from search engines like Google and Yahoo. Examples of search terms that have been targeted for customer searches include the following phrases:

Maine waterfront lodging
Camden Maine lodging
Camden Maine accommodations
Camden Maine motel
Rockport Maine motel
Rockport Maine Lodging
Rockland Maine lodging
Rockland Maine motel
Lodging in Camden Maine

The motel consistently rates very highly in the three major search engines for these targeted keyword phrases often showing up in the first page of results.

Performance Marketing at Its Best
The new site launched in conjunction with the first day of the traditional Maine Summer Tourist season in May of 2005. It featured a simplified home page design, real-time reservations displaying individual room assignments, as well as a "select your own room" application that allowed customers to select specific rooms from a list of available inventory. With integrated e-commerce for online bookings, the Ledges By The Bay now has a sophisticated and professionally designed website for its online customer transactions.

The result of the project was clear: online bookings increased significantly, and now account for well over half of all reservations made. Additionally, web traffic has increased dramatically as well. In 2007, for example, nearly 50,000 people visited the Ledges website, an increase of over 60% from the original site's traffic. Most importantly, total business income increased nearly 45% in the two years from the launch date of the redesigned site.