Twelve hotels, one voice, no house style

Twelve independent hotels, acquired over nine years, each with its own following. Group marketing wanted consistency. The general managers, correctly, wanted nothing to do with it. Meanwhile seventy per cent of bookings arrived through platforms taking fifteen to eighteen per cent.

Guests could not name the group and did not care to. What they did do, repeatedly, was return — to the same hotel. The asset was not a group brand, it was twelve pieces of local knowledge that nobody had ever written down.

Hollis Bay became an editorial standard rather than a visual one. Each hotel keeps its name, its colours and its front door. What they share is a way of writing: every property publishes the same twelve things, in the same order, in the voice of the people who work there. The wordmark appears once, small, in the footer.

One platform, twelve skins, one content model. Room pages carry the local writing rather than the group boilerplate, which is also what made them worth ranking. Booking moved from a modal to a real page with a real URL, which the search work then had something to point at.