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Hospitality · 5 months

Boutique Hotel Stari Grad

Kotor, Montenegro

Doubled shoulder-season bookings for a family-run boutique hotel in Kotor old town

Shoulder-season bookings
+200%
YoY, March-May window
Direct bookings
14% → 51%
of total reservations
Average daily rate
+€34
in shoulder months
Travel guide features
0 → 2
German, French
The Situation

Where they started

Aleksandra Petrović and her family had run the hotel for fifteen years. Summer ran itself — Kotor is a cruise stop and an Adriatic destination. But the rest of the year was a slog. The booking engine they had built in 2019 charged a flat 12% commission, and OTA channels (Booking.com, Expedia) took another 18-22% on top. There was no direct-booking incentive on the site, no English-language SEO presence, and the photography was iPhone shots from 2017.

The Work

What we built and ran

  • 1
    New photography session covering the rooms, the courtyard, and the old-town context the hotel sits in
  • 2
    Multilingual rebuild: English, German, Italian, Russian — the four languages 90% of off-season guests speak
  • 3
    Connected a direct-booking engine that undercut OTA prices by 8% to incentivize direct bookings
  • 4
    Built a "shoulder-season Kotor" content strategy: walking guides, restaurant pairings, day trips to Lovćen and Perast
  • 5
    Pitched and won a feature in a German-language travel guide and a French boutique-hotel newsletter
Timeline

How it unfolded

Month 1
Photography, content briefs, multilingual site scope
Month 2
Site launch, direct-booking engine integrated, OTA channel parity respected
Month 3
First German travel guide feature; March-April direct bookings up 60% YoY
Month 4-5
Shoulder-season occupancy hits 78% (vs. 38% prior year); September pre-bookings already strong

"Mali butik hotel u staroj jezgri Kotora. Andreja je iz regiona i razume kako mali porodični biznis radi. The new site got us listed in two travel guides and our shoulder-season bookings doubled."

AP
Aleksandra Petrović
Owner, Boutique Hotel Stari Grad

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