Luxury Hotel Branding
A Brand Refresh for Intour Maldives.
LUXURY HOTEL BRANDING
Having the right branding for your business is essential for marketing yourself correctly compared to your competitors. For Intour Maldives, this meant focusing on luxury hotel branding that exuded calmness.
Intour Maldives brings over 25 years of experience to the luxury travel industry, offering unparalleled knowledge and service in booking bespoke holiday experiences across hundreds of resorts in the Maldives. With a long list of regular clients, they are proud to be the world’s leading travel agency for the Maldives with staff who have hands-on experience across numerous resorts. They needed their brand to reflect everything about luxury hotel branding.
Superior visual content is everything.
The brand reached out to Riley and Thomas, looking for a brand refresh to align their website with the websites of the resorts they represent. Their vision aligned with our designers which made the project a passion for the team to complete: the need for the website to exude the feeling of luxury, calmness and serenity.
At the beginning of this project, none of the resort pages on the Intour Maldives website featured any video content which is a vital element in showcasing the luxury hotel branding of the resorts they represent. Our team worked hard to curate video content from the different resorts that could be edited as feature videos on each page. We know that visuals sell and so we took this expertise to the Intour Maldives team, explaining to them all of the benefits that immersive visual content will bring to their website.
INITIAL OBSERVATIONS
When our team first looked at the Intour Maldives website, it lacked the sophistication that was needed to promote the 5-star resorts with the luxury hotel branding that they represent. The client knew they needed to immerse their website users in the Maldives experience, bringing them the culture, food and surroundings that they would experience on a trip booked through Intour Maldives.
FIRST STEPS
The first step our team took in this project was in-depth research of Intour Maldives’ top resort brands to establish synergy between the resorts they represent and their website. From this research, we were able to pull together breathtaking photography and video that brought to life the luxury hotel branding we were trying to capture in this brand refresh. It was easy to ask ourselves “What would I like to see on a travel website?” and channel these wants into the design, making the project a whole team effort to create the best, most immersive website possible.
At the beginning of this project, none of the resort pages on the Intour Maldives website featured any video content which is a vital element in showcasing the luxury hotel branding of the resorts they represent. Our team worked hard to curate video content from the different resorts that could be edited as feature videos on each page. We know that visuals sell and so we took this expertise to the Intour Maldives team, explaining to them all of the benefits that immersive visual content will bring to their website.
Luxury Logos and Icon Integration for Luxury Hotel Branding
Intour Maldives came to us with an icon already designed that they wished to keep which represented the sunset on a beach in the Maldives and so we worked with this to develop the main logo, used it to influence the typeface and trialled the new colour palette with the icon. It took hours of experimenting with the spacing and sizing of the Intour Maldives logo before we felt we had truly captured luxury hotel branding with this new design.
The key with logo design is within the detail and that is why at Riley and Thomas we will spend dedicated time testing and trialling numerous versions of your logo before we settle on the one that is right for your brand. With Intour Maldives, the final detail came in the ‘R’ with the swooping tail that was crafted to represent diving into the luxury world of the resorts represented by Intour Maldives.
The Importance Of Colour In Luxury Hotel Branding
It was important to our team that the new colour palette created for this brand reflected the calmness of luxury hotel branding and that simply looking at the colours could transport a website user to the beaches of a resort in the Maldives. There are now six key brand colours for the Intour Maldives branding, all of which have been inspired by images taken from resort websites to reflect the sand, sea and infrastructure you would see when visiting:
Deep Blue
Coral Blue
Stingray White
Stilt House Brown
Paradise Leaf
Charcoal Fire
Curating Unforgettable Experiences.
Intour Maldives are the leading experts in luxury travel within the Maldives. This is their speciality with no other locations offered in their packages. They are everything that is luxury hotel branding in the area and after their branding refresh with Riley and Thomas, their website exudes the sense of sophistication, relaxation and luxury that you would expect.
