How a new digital booking experience dramatically increased conversions for Premier Inn

To kick off, we held a three-day stakeholder workshop to answer these fundamental questions:

• What does it mean to be a ‘digital’ business?
• How do current ways of working need to evolve?
• What additional roles and skills are needed to succeed?

Outcomes were crystallised into a six-month programme, which aimed at recruiting, onboarding and upskilling Whitbread’s digital team.

We worked to upskill teams in Agile at Whitbread, and supported the recruitment and onboarding of new Premier Inn people.

Our Academy and Agile teams supported the creation and running of a bespoke onboarding bootcamp, the Whitbread Digital Academy. We also provided access to a wide catalogue of training, allowing them to continuously learn and develop their own digital skills.

AND Digital successfully took Premier Inn from zero digital capability in-house to having a fully functioning product management team in just six months.

This growth led to a 30% reduction in the use of third-party suppliers to deliver further digital work, and also increased delivery velocity within Whitbread four times over.

We also delivered work across 10 more of Whitbread’s other sites, including:

• Business.premierinn.com, the corporate booking tool
• The Premier Inn app on both iOS and Android
• Beefeater.com
• premierinn.de, a brand new German language site
• m.premierinn.com, the mobile Premier Inn site

Finally, as a result of this work, a two-year plan was devised for Premier Inn’s digital journey.