HighratedHotels

www.highratedhotels.com

HighratedHotels is a hotel booking platform where users can search, compare, and book from over 3 million hotels worldwide. Using Google ratings, the platform calculates a score that determines the default ranking of hotels.

Reisebüro Europa, located at Karlstraße 65a in Darmstadt, has been a trusted partner for European travel for over 20 years. With the new platform HighratedHotels, the company is expanding its services with an innovative self-service hotel portal.

This makes the travel agency a trustworthy German alternative to major international providers such as Booking and Opodo.

Customer Benefits

• Native iOS & Android app
• SEO-optimized web app
• Marketing team can manage all content via the content management system:
  • App content can be created and managed
  • Newsletter campaigns can be created using the app’s design and data base
• Referral system: existing customers refer new ones
• A/B testing for creating, running, and analyzing experiments to optimize KPIs
• Automatic user assignment to marketing channels
• Automated, scheduled sending of personalized offers per user
• Analysis of anonymized user data to optimize KPIs (conversion rate, user retention, campaign effectiveness, etc.)
• Omnichannel marketing campaigns (email, push notifications)
• Secure payment processing via Stripe
• Event-based backend manages data streams and ensures up-to-date daily data

Implementation

AppJoy was responsible for the entire technical implementation of the project — from the architecture to the backend, frontend, and the integration of hotel and payment APIs.

Thanks to AppJoy's incremental approach, the project could be validated with low initial costs. During the feasibility study, a prototype was developed that had a single function: to search the hotel database, attach Google ratings to the results, and then display the hotels ordered by the calculated score (based on the Google rating).

In the next phase, the MVP was developed: based on the prototype, the first platform was built to cover the entire booking process, complemented by a sleek user interface. This laid the foundation for conducting initial user tests and evaluating how well the booking funnel was received.

In the final development phase, the platform was expanded to cover the full functionality of a self-service booking portal. Together with the travel agency's marketing team, a CMS integration was developed that not only works technically but is also easy and enjoyable for the marketing staff to use. Additional features were implemented, turning the portal into a comprehensive self-service platform. The first campaigns, including technical performance tracking, were also launched.

To this day, HighratedHotels continues to be developed by AppJoy: new features, improved data analysis, experiments to optimize KPIs, and new CMS components are continuously being developed.