Bluestone Leisure

Challenge

Bluestone Leisure Limited offer holidays and short breaks with high quality accommodation and activities. They are positioned as a premium experience in a leisure complex with investment costs estimated at £120M. They required a phased approach to development and delivery, quickly establishing a compelling web presence and then evolving booking and eCommerce functionality in phased delivery cycles. They required robust marketing, booking and payment systems in order to ensure maximum occupancy, cross selling, client satisfaction and repeat custom. The website represented a key commercial part of the Bluestone project. The business sees online booking as their dominant channel and this project as business-critical. Core issues included: manageable content, dynamic, swift integration with other systems and the potential to deliver multiple websites from one CMS .

Solution

Fusion Workshop employed a structured yet flexible approach to solution development, involving key stakeholders at every opportunity. Fusion Workshop used a robust framework to gather requirements. We submitted a substantial discussion document to the Bluestone team  outlining crucial areas of consideration and themes aimed at protecting ongoing website investment like platform, hosting, application and content architecture.

It became clear that a one-size-fits-all online booking approach, as is often provided by vendors of booking systems, would not work well for Bluestone. The stable, scalable and effective performance of website services was critical to the overall Bluestone project. Because content management was a crucial aspect of the Bluestone online presence our recommendation was to use a respected and supported commercial product that would meet Bluestone’s needs now and in the longer term. A requirement was Micros Opera integration with the CMS, giving Bluestone integration for:

• Customer Relationship Management
• Property management
• Call centre management
• Access control
• Activity reservation
• Marketing

We recommended the Immediacy CMS for implementation and integration as a proven platform based on .Net and SQL server. Plugins were created to give custom functionality.

Results

To deliver the project Fusion Workshop used a refined and tailored effective PRINCE2 project management and delivery system. Over five months we met the CMS and unique integration needs. The finished project output allowed Bluestone to use their preferred design agency to easily add visual elements on top of the complex functionality provided.

The Bluestone Leisure contract is one of many successful projects delivered using an enterprise CMS, integrated with other systems. Contact us to discuss web integration projects.