Gourmet Collection

IHG’s private dining and lifestyle club across three countries - one collateral system and one app, with campaigns run market by market.

Group: InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG)
Markets: Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia
Properties: 20 hotels across InterContinental, Crowne Plaza, Hotel Indigo, Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express
Role: Designer - collateral, interface and campaigns
Scope: Collateral system, print production, mobile app interface, website, EDMs
Focus: Restaurants, bars and spas

The Gourmet Collection website, with its country selector

The programme

Gourmet Collection is IHG’s private dining and lifestyle club for South East Asia. One membership, three countries, and around twenty hotels spanning five IHG brands - InterContinental, Crowne Plaza, Hotel Indigo, Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express.

A card bought in Singapore is welcome at the Malaysian and Indonesian hotels too, which is the whole proposition and also the whole design problem: the collateral has to be one system while the campaigns stay local, because a Jakarta member and a Penang member are not being sold the same evening.

Participating hotels

Singapore

InterContinental Singapore
Crowne Plaza Changi Airport
Hotel Indigo Singapore Katong
Holiday Inn Singapore Orchard City Centre
Holiday Inn Express Clarke Quay
Holiday Inn Express Katong
Holiday Inn Express Orchard Road
Holiday Inn Resort Batam

Malaysia

InterContinental Kuala Lumpur
Holiday Inn Kuala Lumpur Glenmarie
Holiday Inn Melaka
Holiday Inn Penang
Holiday Inn Express Kuala Lumpur

Indonesia

InterContinental Bandung Dago Pakar
Crowne Plaza Jakarta
Crowne Plaza Bandung
Holiday Inn Bandung Pasteur
Holiday Inn Cikarang Jababeka
Holiday Inn Jakarta Kemayoran
Holiday Inn & Suites Jakarta Gajah Mada

What I did

The collateral system shared across all three markets, the mobile app interface, and the email campaigns written and built per country.

Shared collateral is cheaper to print and harder to design: every piece has to work for a beach resort in Batam and a city hotel in Kuala Lumpur, in a programme whose members may only ever visit one of them.

Gourmet Collection membership wallet, front cover — The wallet is the constant - identical in all three countries, so the programme reads as one club rather than three.

Inside the Gourmet Collection membership wallet — Inside, the privileges - dining, stays and spa - laid out so a member can find one benefit without reading all of them.

Gourmet Collection membership envelope — The welcome envelope.

Gourmet Collection table tent — Table tents, which do the recruiting in the restaurants themselves.

The Gourmet Collection certificate book, opened — The certificate book - the part of a dining membership that gets torn out and handed over, so it had to be worth keeping and easy to detach.

The app

The club’s app carried the same system onto a phone: offers, participating venues and the member’s own card, for the moment at the table when a paper wallet is in a drawer at home.

Gourmet Collection mobile app interface screens — App screens - the venue list is the app’s real job, because twenty hotels is too many to remember.

The Gourmet Collection app shown on an iPhone

The campaigns

Then the part that could not be shared. Each market ran its own calendar against its own restaurants, so the EDMs were designed and built per country off the same components - Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia - and localised where the offer needed it.

Indonesia

Campaigns for the Bandung and Jakarta properties.

Malaysia

Campaigns for Kuala Lumpur, Melaka and Penang, with the market’s own card and table tent.

Gourmet Collection table tent, Malaysia — And its table tent.

Singapore

Campaigns for the Singapore and Batam properties.

Outcome

Gourmet Collection ran across roughly twenty IHG hotels in three countries off one collateral system, one app and three campaign calendars.

It is the largest of the loyalty programmes here by property count, and the one that most clearly shows the difference between a template and a system: the pieces are shared, the markets are not.