In the summer of 2016, Britannia Hotel closed its doors to undergo one of Scandinavia's largest renovations of a hotel ever. The hotel was bought in the autumn of 2015 by Reitangruppen and Odd Reitan and was to be run as an independent hotel - without any help from a large established hotel chain, but with expertise from a small team of hoteliers and a few selected partners, who became part of the project early on.

(Work developed under ANTI Trondheim & ANTI Bergen)

For many years, the Britannia Hotel had lost its naturally leading position in the city and gained a reputation as worn, bad, old-fashioned and sturdy. And nowhere near a luxurious hotel experience.

The pride and history of the past was not talked about among the people of Trondheim and both visitors and local guests in Trondheim chose other places to eat and live. Of a declining proportion of regular guests, the age average was extremely high and the hotel was perceived as outdated and irrelevant.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 the heyday (with existing and very mixed associations from the last 20 years of operation fresh in the memory of the people)?

We touched all aspects of the Britannia Hotel brand: from the new Brand Strategy, Visual identity and system for the hotel's masterbrand & 8 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 is a destination for pleasure and lasting memories – A House of Influence.