Alton Towers, the UK's most famous theme park, has significantly enhanced its online hotel booking system with Adobe Flex. Flex has made the booking process easier, faster and has led to an increase in the number of hotel bookings made online and an improved conversion rate. (experience & engage here...)

Flex has enabled Alton Towers to quickly and easily deliver a scalable, flexible solution that has helped improve the customer experience. By enriching the customer experience, the new website has already seen an overall increase in online hotel bookings since implementation. Alton Towers Hotels received around 3 per cent of its bookings through the previous system but now more than 10 per cent of bookings are made online allowing them to reduce contact centre costs. Users can now find all the information they need to make a booking directly on the website. Furthermore, the conversion rate for people visiting the site and going on to make a booking has risen from 5 per cent to 10 per cent.

Alton Towers worked with Monochrome, a new-media agency delivering Enterprise Rich Internet Applications (RIA), to design and implement the online hotel booking system and website. "A good user experience for our customers is vital to us," said Sarah Dixon, brand manager, Alton Towers Hotels. "Interactivity is very important for our brand and we pride ourselves on providing a great customer experience at every stage – from the booking, right through to the visit. It helps us to remain competitive.
We've had great feedback from our guests on the site's usability. They say the site gives clearer information and people are able to understand what is on offer more easily."

"Alton Towers wanted to expand their level of service by moving from a standard HTML site to using RIA," said Jan Vels Jensen, director, EMEA marketing, Adobe. "This has given customers a more flexible and engaging way of making bookings online, allowing all ordering to be done in one process. Companies that take the chance to adopt this approach always see a good return on investment."

"People are starting to realise the potential of Rich Internet Applications, and as they do, designers are realising the potential of Flex," said Adrian Munn, director, Monochrome. "Using Flex, we benefited from a drastically reduced time to market for this initiative. It has an intuitive interface and is really easy to use. It even allows users to 'tab' between options. It's good that Adobe have built an application where ease of use for the end user comes first."

Adobe Flex increases the effectiveness of enterprise applications by blending the richness of the desktop with the reach of the web. Flex enables developers to deliver applications that provide users with immediate response, smooth transitions between states and displays and continuous workflow without interruptions.