QHotels – AA’s Hotel Group of the Year 2014-15 – is one of the UK’s most luxurious hotel chains with 27 four and five star hotels, equalling over 3,800 bedrooms. The hotel group approached Control F1 for help with the management of its website, including an overhaul of its membership and points system and the implementation of an Enterprise Marketing Solution (EMS).
The new site has been built using a Kentico EMS, allowing QHotels to quickly and easily update their website with new information and offers. The EMS also offers insights in the form of statistics and analytics, helping the hotel to understand which leisure facilities are proving the most popular and to tailor discounts and special offers accordingly.
“With QHotels acquiring six new golf resorts back in November 2014 we went about aligning our golf membership proposal across the group. We had an existing online flexible membership product but this needed refreshing. Through dmbgroup, Control F1 were employed to build our new flexible membership model now known as QFairway. We were looking for an organisation that was structured in its work but also nimble enough to adapt to our business requirements and Control F1 delivered on both fronts. We are delighted with what they helped us to produce and we look forward to our ongoing future partnership.”
Overall, a hole-in-one for Control F1!
The RAC – a leading motoring services organisation with over eight million members – recently launched RAC Advance, a telematics solution. RAC Advance provides motorists with a “magic box” that will monitor driving behaviour, rewarding good drivers with savings on their vehicle insurance and offering advice on potential fuel efficiency savings.
The RAC needed help integrating their new telematics platform into the core business, managing the platform, and developing the product offering further.
Our technical team – who have specialist capability in the telematics industry and already provide consultancy, development and support devices for
, Masternaut and GlobaVista, to name a few – provided the perfect strategic partnership, bringing expertise in cloud-hosted systems to the table too.
Initially, Control F1 conducted due diligence, quality reviews, technical support and knowledge capturing activities, assisting the RAC’s internal team in assimilating the new telematics division into the business.
We have since been contracted by the RAC as their technical partner to deliver the product’s roadmap, by extending and building upon the existing platform. In addition, we continue to manage the platform and provide 3
Control F1 manages the RAC Advance Platform, ensuring continuity of service and rapid delivery of the RAC’s product roadmap. This strategic relationship has enabled the RAC to focus on the commercial success of it new product.
Our work with Control F1 has been fundamental in terms of developing and improving our market leading telematics offering. Through heavily embedding our Advance platform into Amazon’s cloud ecosystem, Control F1 has helped to provide the RAC with a strong competitive advantage, significant operational cost savings, and simpler and more robust scaling, redundancy and archiving strategies.
It’s important not to see telematics just as a stand-alone product, but as a technology that sits behind a whole range of services we offer, and that makes it a much more powerful offering. With the help of Control F1 we are seizing the opportunity to drive the telematics proposition at the RAC, and to be at the forefront of a big step change in the industry as a whole.
More and more people are turning to digital guides and apps to plan and enjoy their holidays. Apps can provide holidaymakers with a wealth of interactive local information at their fingertips, without the need for any excess baggage.
That’s why we built Zanduli; a truly white-label destination-marketing app that provides tourism boards, destination management organisations, tour operators and resorts with their very own interactive travel guide.
CEO Carl Howarth discusses the success of Control F1 and how it came about
June 2017 by Dale Reed / Product Development Director
Can you give us a history of Control F1 to date?
"We founded the company back in 2010, starting with just a couple of us working out of our homes. As anyone with young children will no doubt relate, we quickly realised we needed to move into an office, and set up in Huddersfield in West Yorkshire. The first few years, as with many new start ups, were pretty tough, and we took on whatever work we could to keep the lights on. Fortunately we had good contacts in the industry and were building a reputation for quality work and being responsive, enabling us to get new work through word of mouth and building up a small but loyal client base.
As the company gained traction and a name for itself, we started picking up larger clients who needed more complex enterprise applications. Our staff expanded, and so did our office space. At times it felt like we were moving every other week to make room for new people! We were also spending a good proportion of our time working on asset tracking solutions, and we have now tracked everything from road vehicles, marine vessels, celebrities, criminals and even at one point Kit-Kats!
I think our biggest break from this acquisition of telematics knowledge really came with the RAC Advance platform. We'd already developed the RAC's website for them in a Content Management System, and they were aware we had a lot of telematics experience behind us. They were developing a black box system for their insurance division that would track driver behaviour and enable them to create usage based insurance, with better drivers benefitting from a discount on their annual premiums. Control F1 were engaged to develop all of the back end systems to receive, process and analyse the data provided by all of these vehicles, in a cost effective and timely manner. It was a huge project and required a large team of developers and managers working over 18 months to complete. It really gave us a name for quality work in this rapidly emerging marketplace and opened a lot more doors for us.
