The Cairns Alpine Resort & Golf Club

Elevating customer experience for boutique
Lake Tekapo accommodation and tourism experiences.

The Challenge

The Challenge

The Cairns Alpine Resort and Golf Club, located in the picturesque Lake Tekapo, is a stunning holiday destination in the south island of New Zealand.

The uniqueness of The Cairns comes from its rich history of farming, which has transpired into unforgettable guest experiences that combine modern comforts with rustic, restored high country lodges, huts and home-stays.  In addition to accommodation, The Cairns offers a wide range of activities unique to the region - including stargazing and the popular golf course. 

While The Cairns was making significant year-on-year progress with it’s on-site facilities and operations it's online presence wasn't keeping up, which meant that there was an opportunity to  address challenges in specific areas throughout their customer journey -  pre, during and post visit. 
Project Goals

Project Goals

The Cairns website specifically no longer did an adequate job of showcasing their different accommodation options, making it difficult for the user to understand what might work best for their needs. Furthermore, the CRM system was clunky and outdated, which made the booking experience even more complicated both externally for customers and internally for management. These were the fundamental challenges that ultimately hindered the wider guest experience, which The Cairns was ready to tackle in a comprehensive manner.


If not resolved sooner than later Cairns knew that these challenges, many of which were user-experience led, would have negative implications for its business moving forward. Not only was their existing website and booking system creating bottlenecks for current bookings, given customer expectations when compared to the competition there was legitimate risk in getting left behind. 


Clunky user experiences online can erode engagement over time, which will result in missed opportunities to attract and retain high-value customers, as well as provide them with a memorable experience that they would continue talking about with friends and family long after their visit. 
Our Solution

Our Solution

To overcome these hurdles and achieve their objectives, we began with performing a comprehensive Website and CRM Audit to better understand the current digital landscape strengths and weaknesses. Our Audit serves as a foundational step for:

  1. Addressing existing technical issues that if not remedied will lower Google rankings.

  2. Enhancing user experience to drive better online engagement and conversion on bookings.

  3. Facilitates data-driven decision making to ensure cost and resource efficiency remains the priority.  


By positioning the customer at the centre of their digital strategy, it now laid the groundwork for subsequent projects that  ensured customer experience was a priority throughout key user journey touchpoints and  project milestones.

  1. SEO & Content Strategy: Through thorough SEO analysis, we pinpointed opportunities for optimisation, both on-page and off-page. A comprehensive content strategy was devised, focusing on keyword optimisation and the creation of high-quality, relevant content.

  2. Website Redesign: Our design team crafted an aesthetically pleasing, user-friendly, and responsive website design. This design overhaul was created in conjunction with the booking system analysis, which enabled us to focus primarily on enhancing the overall user experience from end-to-end.

  3. Conversion Tracking: Implementing advanced analytics and conversion tracking tools allows us to continue to monitor user behaviour and measure the effectiveness of various ongoing marketing initiatives. We can now leverage specific goals and funnels to scrutinise the performance of key conversion points such as reservations and newsletter sign-ups, which enabled us to make better data-driven decisions moving forward. 
The Benefits

The Benefits

The result of our digital strategy and website redesign + booking system implementation has immediately began to deliver tangible results for The Cairns Alpine Resort and Golf Club.

The Cairns now can focus on driving traffic, improving user engagement and benefiting from a more tailored, efficient marketing approach overall. Most importantly, our combined efforts are contributing to improved brand experience and loyalty in a competitive tourism marketplace.
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