Michelin Stars sparkle atop Bangkok’s ‘vertical’ resort
Few settings are more glamorous than the world’s highest open-air bar. ‘Sky Bar’ feels like a movie set because it was: key scenes from Hollywood’s Hangover 2 were filmed 63-storeys up atop Bangkok’s ‘lebua at State Tower’, a unique collection of luxury suites, 5-star bars, exclusive clubs, and Michelin-starred restaurants.
There you’ll see the city’s skyline glittering, world travellers mingling, and the haute monde of the Thai capital dancing, drinking, and dining beneath the stars. By any standard of travel luxury, the energy at lebua is as thrilling as its soaring vertical layout.
On one floor you can watch a 3-star Michelin Chef performing epicurean magic; on another you can sip from a crystal flute in a champagne bar with exclusive labels found nowhere else in Asia. A floor below, a whiskey bar features lebua’s own patiently aged vintage. And so it goes floor-by-floor, venue-by-venue, a total of thirteen elegant and romantic settings adding up to the World Travel Awards’ ‘Asia Leading Luxury All-Suite Hotel’ four years running.
The Challenge
Wallop was invited to solve two challenges for lebua: first, establish it as a local prestige venue for Bangkok’s local glitterati and second, make it a global destination for luxury tourists.
We responded by asking, ‘could experiential dining options be leveraged to fill lebua’s luxury suites’? Could Michelin-starred restaurants find a local audience in a city of 7 million people that boasts 11,000 restaurants
The website had to reflect the higher levels of affluence needed to draw international guests and dining connoisseurs. lebua was a venue where the brightest of dreams come true yet the website’s imagery was selectively dark and dated. The ‘thrills’ which targeted foreign and local ‘dreamers’ needed greater amplification. More direct international bookings for luxury suites was a key objective, as were greater restaurant reservations from Bangkok high-lifers. How then to pull the world’s most affluent customers through its lustrous brass doors? How to situate its restaurants to compete with the best in the world?
The Results
Wallop dared to dream so that website visitors might too.
Once our brand discovery team completed its report, Wallop Film shot, cut, and scored a video for the website’s homepage telling the story of lebua as seen through the eyes of a guest. This ‘dream’ video also set the table for a website design applying more white space to accentuate the images. Less aesthetic but no less important was our optimization of the website’s speed. When combined with the addition of the booking widget to every page, lebua’s ‘dreamers’ could now tab between restaurant and room bookings in good time.
We paired these UX enhancements with our data acumen to give this prestigious property the quality and quantity of results it calls for. To facilitate the particular stages of the customer journey for every bar and restaurant, Wallop developed an audience and demographically driven campaign structure of 146 unique campaigns for each entity.
Wallop also deployed an ambitious keyword targeting campaign that included more than 21,000 individual keywords to encompass the range of interests among our target markets. And we created a reliable marketing funnel for each of lebua’s venues such that capacity could be increased or decreased as occupancy or volume dictated.
Finally we developed a multi-network strategy leveraging the Search, Display and Video channels enabling audiences to engage with the property through vastly different yet equally informative creative formats.
Despite the massive scale and scope of these initiatives, the account was fastidiously optimized for converting new guest bookings for $14 USD or less each.
Increase in conversion volume
Increase in account share in 15 months
Increase in click volume in three months with the same budget
