In the last 4 or 5 months I have had the pleasure of working alongside Henry Crawford on a new venture of his – called LuxuryLodge. As well as being an extremely accomplished and decorated Australian television producer in last two decades Henry has built up the famous Vatulele Island Resort in Fiji. Vatulele was named Small Luxury Hotel of the Year in 2000 and for several years Henry served on the International Board for the Small Luxury Hotels of the World Group representing Asia and the Pacific. In 2007 Henry sold Vatulele Island to the international Six Senses Group.

Henrys’ new Luxury Lodge mission is to identify and bring to subscribers attention to the best of the worlds Luxury Lodges. Interestingly Luxury Lodge is not setting up to be a booking website initially – and personally I think this is great. The focus instead is on Henry actually personally recommending the lodges around the world that he knows and has come in contact with over his 20 odd years in the industry. I have to say it is a pretty tough job staying at some of these places and every meeting, strategy session or design workshop we did I could not help feeling the green envy swell up inside me. Some of the photos we have had to work with on the site as just staggeringly beautiful. Imagine having to sip cocktails, lay on secluded beaches and sleep in absolute luxury – just too tough.

The goal is to identify and award only the worlds’ best lodges the merit of being a Luxury Lodge. Over time it is hoped that the brand becomes well recognised and potential customers choose their lodges based on this recommendation. To this extent Henry is being very careful who he recommends based on a number of very specific and very transparent characteristics – no more so than his personal knowledge.

To date we at Xebidy have had a fantastic level of involvement in the Luxury Lodge concept development initially being engaged to derive an Internet strategy based around competitor reviews and market analysis and then in development of the newsletter and concept site. It is just fantastic from my point of view working on these sorts of projects because I get to draw on all my tourism experience (and passion) as well as immerse myself in the Internet side of things. I was pretty pleased with the whole plan that we ended up with.

We believed that initially the newsletter was far more important than the site itself and so we focussed our energies on getting a good brand and on Henry producing good content – which he did (in truck loads!!). The brand and look and feel was developed by Campbell Barnett in Sydney – who have a pretty amazing client portfolio and I think have done a really good job. Not really what I would call web orientated but that hopefully is the next step and we have already done some design work here at Xebidy on this direction.

To accompany the first newsletter introducing Luxury Lodge and the some of the selected Lodges we developed a concept site. This is basically an online reproduction of a PDF developed by Campbell Barnett introducing Luxury Lodge. The website has no real functionality to speak of – it does a simple and clean job of introducing the concept and the team behind it. The list of mentors assisting Henry in this business is definitely impressive reading. The newsletter itself we developed on PHPList.

A database of over 4,000 email addresses had been built up of those interested in the Luxury Lodge concept and the first email newsletter was received with huge accolades from readers. In fact the growth in subscribers has also been notable and the unsubscribes absolutely negligible. Which just goes to show Internet Marketing is all about producing good quality content that people want to read. It is not about spamming people but actually giving them something useful and enjoyable. If you are looking for some fantastic reading every two months – and can handle the envy and insatiable longing (or better still can afford this level of holiday) then I urge you to subscribe.

It has been a great project from our point of view because it is something that is being built from the ground up with some real strong principals and objectives behind it. It definitely has not gone as fast I would have liked but I think is primarily because we really have been developing a concept as we go. On the flip side actually seeing the concept now taking fruition gives a good feeling. The day that the 4,000 newsletters went out was a real buzz in the office. We are aiming for a second newsletter this month I think and then hopefully we will get to implementing the site real in the next few.

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