The Stafford London
A Mayfair five-star hotel with years of direct growth behind it, a portfolio growing around it, and a website that could only describe one of the businesses.
The context
The Stafford London is a historic five-star hotel in Mayfair, minutes from Green Park and St James’s. By the time this project started it had three years of year-on-year growth through the direct channel behind it — the digital function was working, and the question had moved on from whether to invest to what to invest in next.
What had changed was the shape of the business. The Stafford was no longer one property with one website. Norma and The Game Bird needed a digital presence, and all of them shared an audience, a data model and a commercial objective with the hotel.
What was disconnected
Each new venue meant another build, another set of tracking, another content workflow and another conversation about who owned the guest. Nothing carried forward, so every launch started from nothing and the group learned very little from the last one.
That is the pattern the Flywheel exists to break. The cost was not one bad website. It was the compounding cost of never being able to reuse a decision.
What we changed
We researched, planned, designed and built a single bespoke platform that all businesses run on. The marketing capability was built into the platform rather than bolted on afterwards:
- Personalisation and geo-messaging, so the same page can speak differently to a returning guest and a first-time visitor
- Data capture and dynamic remarketing wired to the same audience definitions the ad accounts use
- Google Ads API integration, so campaign structure and site content stay in step
- Custom event tracking across every revenue stream, not just rooms
- Live chat routed into the sales team and reception
- Advanced SEO and structured data as a property of the platform rather than a per-site task
Which disciplines were involved
Experience built and designed the platform. Growth ran the advertising it was built to serve. Advisory shaped the integration decisions and the multi-site architecture. The work has since grown to cover Google Ads, search optimisation and ongoing digital strategy.
What improved
Website revenue has increased by over 40% across the life of the platform, and the platform itself has held: it is still the hub the group runs wider marketing activity through, years after launch.
What the work taught
The most useful outcome was not the launch. It was that adding the next business to the estate stopped being a project. Once the platform, the tracking and the audience model are shared, the fourth venue costs a fraction of the first — and the group learns something from each one.
