A House of Influence since 1870

In the summer of 2016, Britannia Hotel closed its doors for an extensive renovation. The hotel was bought in the autumn of 2015 by Reitangruppen and Odd Reitan and was to be run as an independent hotel, without the backing of a large hotel chain, but with expertise from a small team of hoteliers and a few selected partners who became part of the project early on.

For many years, Britannia Hotel had lost its natural leading position in the city and gained a reputation as worn, poor, old-fashioned and dull. Nowhere near a luxurious hotel experience.

The pride and history of the past were no longer talked about among the people of Trondheim, and both visitors and local guests chose other places to eat and stay. Among a shrinking share of regular guests, the average age was very high, and the hotel was perceived as outdated and irrelevant.

How do you create marketing for a closed hotel, build a brand new five-star luxury brand and take the hotel and new guests back to its heyday, with existing and very mixed associations from the last 20 years of operation still fresh in people's memory?

We touched all aspects of the Britannia Hotel brand: from the new brand strategy, visual identity and system for the hotel's masterbrand and eight unique food and wellness concepts, we developed a new communication and content strategy that shaped the hotel's online destination for booking, curated stories and campaigns.

Britannia Hotel’s reputation and legacy are built on stories, of those who work at, live in, and visit the hotel. Every time someone enters, they leave a bit of themselves and take something from the experiences they enjoy.

We saw this as an opportunity to create a brand platform that allowed the hotel to become a storyteller of past reminiscence and set new influences for stories from future guests through the brand platform “A House of Influence since 1870”. A brand platform that allows Britannia Hotel to act as an influential house that collects and curates the hotel's part of Trondheim and Norwegian history.

The platform allows past guests and new guests to learn from the hotel's history, create their own memories, and build new traditions together with the Britannia Hotel brands. The hotel lives in the space between people as the connector of stories, giving the guest different doors in, where each of the doors leads the guest to a different experience and new influences.

A unique hotel designed, curated and staffed with heritage, style and vision. Britannia Hotel is a destination for pleasure and lasting memories: A House of Influence.

Read more about how we work with brand platforms and identity.

Britannia Hotel reopened in April 2019. The brand platform has since been the foundation for the hotel's campaigns, and the summer campaign delivered 30% more website users and more than doubled room bookings from Denmark.