How Center Parcs’ data-driven approach led to a $22.5 million increase in annual revenue

Source: Pierre & Vacances Center Parcs Group

The Company

Pierre & Vacances Center Parcs Group is a leading tourism and hospitality brand best known for its entertainment villages, leisure activity residences, and hotels. Florent Champigny is the eCommerce and Innovation Director, in charge of ensuring a great customer experience on the brand’s digital channels.

Source: Pierre & Vacances Center Parcs Group

The Challenge

With plenty of competition in the travel and tourism space, it was important for Center Parcs to keep up with the changing world of digital to remain competitive and continue delighting its customers.

“For us, a successful customer experience hinges on a number of micro-actions to reduce friction points,” explains Florent. “And with more than half of our revenue coming from digital (around $730M) it’s a huge driver of growth for us.”

With this in mind, the team decided to redesign the Center Parcs website. Their goal was twofold: 

  1. To ensure a seamless, mobile-first customer experience (a crucial competitive element).
  2. To refine their existing customer journey with a data-driven approach. 

"
Declining attention spans and high mobile traffic were driving new patterns of customer behavior. Optimizing our digital customer experience became an essential next step for us to stay competitive."

Florent Champigny

eCommerce and Innovation Director
Pierre & Vacances Center Parcs Group

The Solution

Florent’s team used Contentsquare to analyze digital customer behavior across the site. They started by focusing their attention on improving the holiday property search results page. 

The first step was analyzing how customers were using the page. Using Zone-Based Heatmaps, they noticed visitors were interacting heavily with the ‘Number of Rooms’ filter. With a high click rate and healthy conversion rate, this functionality played a key role in the buyer decision journey. “However, this key filter was buried among dozens of other options,” says Florent, which was leading to a frustrating customer experience.

Thanks to Contentsquare insights, Florent’s team was able to make a data-driven decision to rethink the positioning of the ‘Number of Rooms’ filter. The team placed the filter in the second position on the filter bar, adding a dropdown row of room number tabs to allow users to quickly see which properties could accommodate their party. 

With just one click, visitors were able to quickly filter to suitable properties, helping to streamline the customer journey and removing friction from their journey to purchase. 

The team used various other tools within the Contentsquare platform, such as Customer Journey Analysis and Session Replay, to gain a granular understanding of their customer’s online behavior to deliver a site redesign that better catered to the needs of their audience.

Source: Pierre & Vacances Center Parcs Group

The Results

The data-driven website redesign helped Florent and his team achieve:

  • A $22.5M increase in annual revenue
  • A 5% increase in overall conversions
  • A 46% increase in mobile conversion rate
  • A 118% increase in mobile revenue

“Mission accomplished,” smiles Florent, “Contentsquare enabled our team to take action around each step of the buyer decision journey, streamlining the customer experience and increasing conversions.”