Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts

Caring and hospitality at the highest level

Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts is the world’s leading Asia-based luxury hotel group. The heart of the Group’s success, as expressed by the company’s leaders, is its commitment to its people—the hotel and resort employees whose everyday guest contact creates the ‘Shangri-La moment.’

In the past few years, the Group substantially increased the number of properties in its core markets, and was poised to introduce the brand to new markets in North America and Europe. However, the existing site did not reflect the level of service, attention to detail, and elegance that a Shangri-La guest expects, and its expression of Asian hospitality overlapped significantly with those of other brands.

The global expansion of the Group offered an opportunity to elevate the brand online for existing customers, and to introduce the Shangri-La experience in the company’s new markets. With the belief that a useful and usable website should echo the level of service that creates preference for Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts, MetaDesign developed a set of online attributes that were used to evaluate approaches to the visual, editorial and interaction design.

The new site features an entirely new design with inviting photography, as well as completely rewritten content to enhance the verbal expression of the brand.

User-centered content and navigation structure

Global usability testing provided a deep understanding of user needs and expectations across markets. Since most users access hotel locations via search engines, property pages were restructured as destination sites within shangri-la.com, with all relevant information available from within that property, such as information on spas, local holidays, and planning events.