Technology Transformation
Gate One supports Premier Inn (Whitbread), Europe’s largest budget hotel chain, with booking platform transformation to enable future growth
To enable its domestic and international growth plans, Whitbread’s number one priority was to enhance its end-to-end technology stack, including the property management system and all customer facing digital systems. It’s ageing Premier Inn booking platform that handled over £2 billion in revenue annually needed to be replaced. But after a failed attempt five years previously, the organisation recognised that it needed the right consultancy support to ensure that a challenging technology transformation of such scale was a success with minimal impact to its millions of online customers.
Gate One was engaged as the trusted transformation advisor for the programme, and was tasked with:
- Help Whitbread to retire the 40-year-old system that was deeply embedded
- Roll out a new, off-the-shelf system requiring a complete website rebuild for 900 hotels across the UK and Germany
- Manage the migration and change management of transferring all 900 hotels from the old platform to the new.
- Integrate with 60 other systems (finance, HR, security, reporting, etc.)
- Drive the Project Management Office (PMO), leading the development and delivery of training 15,000 employees on the new platform.
- Decommissioning the old platform taking GDPR and data confidentiality into consideration.
Collaborating with external partners and Whitbread to co-create the programme vision, Gate One developed a business and customer-centric governance and delivery approach, embedding functional SMEs at every step. It embarked on this multi-transformation endeavour, with over 1,500 requirements impacting 42 systems, 52 integrations and over 250 processes. The programme also entailed significant business change, with fundamental impacts on the roles of over 35,000 staff. At its peak, the project involved approximately 200 people!
In 18 months, Gate One exceeded expectations and contributed to Premier Inn’s continued growth and operation by:
• Revolutionising aging end-to-end technology stack – without the implementation of this new technology stack, the business would effectively cease to exist. The product was out of support and as it was 40 years old, was written in coding language only three people (all close to retirement) knew how to write.
• Improving business processes and automation – significant gains in process with a new intuitive system. Unlocking huge potential in commercial gains through a modern website design allowing for a/b testing, better tracking, basket functionality and ancillaries/ upsell opportunities.
• Laying the foundations for future changes and initiatives – the Opera programme is held up as the single best example of a successful business transformation programme, and therefore the governance, approach and structures are now embedded in all future change programmes at Whitbread.
Whitbread’s technology transformation improved all aspects of the customer journey, from booking to post-stay, and to increase direct bookings and new monetization opportunities. Gate One supported the implementation of an overall technology stack which greatly improves the long-term scalability, resilience, and flexibility of the business.
View the Gate One profile in the MCA Members Directory.