Premier Inn Case Study

The Client

About Premier Inn

With over 800 hotels, Premier Inn is the UK’s largest hotel chain and generates 70% of Whitbread’s revenue.

The majority of Premier Inn’s bookings were digital, however, with the experience being delivered by an offshore provider, there were concerns over expense, quality, and ownership.

So, Whitbread enlisted AND Digital to crack two key challenges simultaneously:

Develop a new digital team to demonstrate the necessity of internal digital capacity at Premier Inn and Whitbread.
Build and launch Premier Inn's first fully digital hotel experience, Hub Hotel.

The ask

Uncovering what digital means to Premier Inn

Gathering insight from stakeholders

To kick off, we held a three-day stakeholder workshop to answer these fundamental questions:

What does it mean to be a ‘digital’ business?
How do current ways of working need to evolve?
What additional roles and skills are needed to succeed?

Outcomes were crystallised into a six-month programme, which aimed at recruiting, onboarding and upskilling Whitbread’s digital team.

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The Process

Developing new ways of working

Upskilling and improved onboarding

We worked to upskill teams in Agile at Whitbread, and supported the recruitment and onboarding of new Premier Inn people.

Our Academy and Agile teams supported the creation and running of a bespoke onboarding bootcamp, the Whitbread Digital Academy. We also provided access to a wide catalogue of training, allowing them to continuously learn and develop their own digital skills.

Improved apps for mobile and web

Working with their product team, we delivered iOS and Android apps and a fully responsive website, for hubhotels.co.uk. To complete this work, we:

Worked out all third party library dependencies, as well as an unfamiliar code-base.
Consolidated a third party vendor’s complicated code branches.
Fixed multiple bugs in existing code, and built all new code locally.
Built a continuous integration pipeline.
Introduced processes like pull requests and build monitoring.
Set up automated testing for the web and mobile applications using browserstack.

On web, the site was developed with AngularJS, Adobe Experience Manager and Java (using Jakarta Server Pages to deliver content); on mobile (iOS and Android) we used Objective-C, Swift, and Java.

Key outcomes

A brand new digital capability

A new product management team in 6 months

AND Digital successfully took Premier Inn from zero digital capability in-house to having a fully functioning product management team in just six months.

This growth led to a 30% reduction in the use of third-party suppliers to deliver further digital work, and also increased delivery velocity within Whitbread four times over.

We also delivered work across 10 more of Whitbread’s other sites, including: