Introduction to E-Commerce

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Part 1: Introduction to E-Commerce and E-Marketplaces

ONLINE FILE W2.2

HOW RAFFLES HOTEL IS CONDUCTING E-COMMERCE

The Problem Raffles Hotel, one of Singapore’s colonial-era landmarks, is part of a worldwide group of luxury and business hotels. Raffles Hotel operates in a very competitive environment. To maintain its world-renowned reputation, the hotel spares no effort on every facet of its operation. The success of the group and each of its hotels depends on the group’s ability to attract customers to its hotels and facilities and on its ability to contain costs. The group also operates the Swissôtel brand of hotels worldwide. Both the Raffles and Swissôtel brands share a reservation system. The Solution To maintain its image and contain costs, Raffles must address two types of issues—B2C and B2B. On the B2C side, Raffles maintains a diversified corporate portal, raffles.com, that introduces customers to the company and its services. The portal includes information on the hotels, a reservation system, links to travelers’ resources, a CRM program, and an online store for Raffles products. The Web site capitalizes on the underlying qualities of the luxurious Raffles hotel product to communicate to the online audience. It has a clearly defined and well-constructed navigation that integrates the brand-level site with the individual hotel Web sites. The Web site uses an architecture with logical and consistent navigational tiers, which has proven to be a highly successful approach. Based on the individual hotel strategy, product mix, and target audience, the Web site navigation reflects the multitiered navigation structure. Each tier represents an order of authority that helps lay out the organization of the Web site. The tiered structure moves users comfortably and easily toward a set of services, including the reservation process. This helps to focus on incremental reservations growth and dynamic content management. The Web site has an integrated online...