Heckfield Place is a luxury hotel and estate in Hampshire. Everything about the on-site experience is considered - from the grounds to the rooms to the restaurant. But the digital experience guests encountered before, during, and after their stay told a different story.
The website, booking system, in-room entertainment, spa recommendations, and dining all ran as separate systems. There was no shared content layer connecting them. A guest browsing the website saw one version of Heckfield Place. A guest checking the spa menu from their room saw another. Nothing felt like it belonged to the same brand.
The website itself was built on a heavily customised WordPress installation. Content updates required developer involvement, even for minor changes. Performance was unreliable - the site regularly crashed during traffic spikes, particularly when high-profile guests attracted press coverage. And the marketing team spent more time chasing IT support than producing the content they needed to.
For a brand that sets its standard by the details, the gap between the physical experience and the digital one was becoming harder to ignore.
"The team at Distinction were instrumental in creating a digital experience that matches the real-world experience we strive to give our guests. They delivered creatively, technically and experientially from start to finish."
The core problem was not the website. It was that every digital touchpoint had been built independently, with no shared foundation. Fixing the website alone would not solve the underlying disconnect.
We migrated the entire digital presence to Umbraco Cloud, using a composable architecture that separated how content was managed from how it was delivered. This gave the team a single place to manage content for every channel - the website, in-room entertainment, spa and dining recommendations - with content structured to be reused across touchpoints rather than duplicated in each one.
The guest-facing experience was restructured around how visitors actually interact with the brand. We reduced the number of steps required to find and book what they were looking for. We built consistent design and messaging across every touchpoint, so the digital experience felt like a natural extension of the physical one. And we made sure the tone, imagery, and level of detail matched what guests would expect from a brand of this calibre.
On the operational side, we moved to managed cloud hosting that eliminated the maintenance overhead the team had been carrying. The new platform was built to handle traffic spikes without intervention - removing the crashes that had been a recurring problem whenever the hotel appeared in the press.
Guest satisfaction improved by 22%. The consistent experience across every touchpoint - from first visit to on-site services - meant guests were interacting with a single, coherent brand rather than a collection of disconnected systems.
The number of clicks required to complete an order dropped by 35%, making it noticeably easier for guests to book and browse. The platform achieved 100% uptime, ending the traffic-spike crashes that had damaged the brand’s credibility at the worst possible moments.
IT support costs dropped by 85%. The team went from relying on developers for routine content changes to managing the entire digital presence independently. That shift freed up both time and budget for the work that actually mattered.
The composable architecture also gave Heckfield Place something it did not have before: the ability to add new digital touchpoints without rebuilding the platform. When the team wants to extend the experience to a new channel or service, the content infrastructure is already in place.
The migration to Umbraco Cloud resulted in:
By embracing a modern CMS, Heckfield Place has successfully aligned its digital presence with the luxury, personalized experience it offers in person—enhancing both guest satisfaction and operational agility.
