The Ritz-Carlton: Redesigning The Journey

The Journey is The Ritz-Carlton’s digital hub for creating travel inspiration, part of the brand’s expertise in setting the stage for life’s most meaningful journeys. Already a successful extension of hotel websites and an impressive reservoir of content, from expert travel recommendations to in-depth looks at unique partnerships, The Ritz-Carlton wanted to elevate the Journey even further through a new design that would maximize its visibility, utility, and performance.

Key to the redesign was a new focus on mobile, with dedicated small-screen formatting of articles integrated across the site. This allowed for greatly expanded accessibility, usability, and opportunities for effective integration with social media and digital content, making Journey a seamless part of campaigns across social media platforms. The Journey also received a substantial update to its look and feel, in a clean, elegant, minimalist digital aesthetic incorporating additional high quality video and photo assets.

For existing content, the segmentation of articles was revamped into new categories better aligning with audience taste — Explore/Destinations, Inspiration, Savor, and Memories. New editorial content was similarly planned and executed with the same preferences in mind, with special attention given to incorporating and expanding the most engaging and exciting content franchises from The Ritz-Carlton.

These choices—a modern, elegant design adapted to a mobile experience, reimagining the structure of previous content, and creating new content carefully integrated into brand content franchises and narratives—proved to be a massive success.

In July 2022, the Journey reached a year-to-date 1.4M page views, nearly matching all of 2021’s 1.5M views in just six months, all but guaranteeing a record amount of traffic as the year continues. Additionally, the Journey drove $3.8M in revenue participation over the same period.