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Situated in the heart of the New Forest National Park and operated by Beaulieu Enterprises, Beaulieu is a popular and award-winning UK tourism attraction.
The park offers visitors a collection of attractions including Beaulieu Abbey a medieval abbey with roots dating back to 1204, when the land was gifted to monks of the Cistercian order, as well as Palace House, the ancestral home of the Montagu family.
However, one of Beaulieu’s best-known attractions is the world-famous National Motor Museum. The vehicles on display range from the earliest motor carriages to classic family saloons, to F1 racing cars and the museum’s 250 vehicle collection is one of the finest assemblies of cars, motorcycles and motoring memorabilia in the world. Beaulieu hosts a large number of motoring events throughout the year, ranging from the world famous International Autojumble, The Beaulieu Supercar Weekend and car rallies for popular brands such as Porsche, Aston Martin and Ford.
Beaulieu receives hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. For the third year running, the attraction has been awarded a gold accolade by national tourism agency VisitEngland, which named it one of the best visitor destinations in the UK.
Within this context Beaulieu’s website is a key tool. It raises awareness about the attractions on offer and visitors use it to research Beaulieu and also take advantage of online discounted tickets.
In short, Beaulieu needed a new website. One that would support traffic analysis and also scale during the months of April through October — Beaulieu’s peak visitor season — and also during peak times, for example, around specific events. Website traffic climbs to a peak in August, culminating with Beaulieu’s popular International Autojumble, an opportunity to find motoring treasures and elusive spare parts for classic car enthusiasts in early September.
Beaulieu spoke to Adventec, a Digital Commerce Agency, which suggested a hosted website platform from Aptum. “We have a strong relationship with Adventec and following their advice and carrying out due diligence on Aptum, it was clear its hosted platform would provide the website uptime and resiliency we needed,”
“It was definitely the right move. In the last year we had 816,000 website visitors with a peak during August of 116,000 visitors. The new website handled the traffic without any issues and can clearly scale to accommodate higher levels of traffic if required.”
As always, the proof is in the pudding. Beaulieu’s website has experienced significant performance improvement and can now effortlessly handle peak website traffic.
“It’s resilient and robust and we don’t have to think about it.”
A clear indication that the Aptum website has been a success is that Beaulieu has had very few issues and today barely gives its website operations a second thought.
“We can rely on the service because Adventec is so close to Aptum. It’s a strong partnership, which is to our advantage. If anything needs to be done, such as security updates, it’s simply carried out by Adventec so we don’t have to do anything.”
The relationship between Beaulieu’s IT partner, Adventec and Aptum is clearly an advantage for Beaulieu. This is a close partnership, representing our robust partner ecosystem, and one in which implicit trust based on long-standing experience is of great value.
“The Aptum hosted website has been so successful, from whichever way we look at it, that we are now looking at a new website for a sister attraction, Buckler’s Hard.”
It is now much easier for Beaulieu to track its website visitors. Goldstraw and her team now have a better idea of where visitors are coming from and where they are going within the site. This data is being used to gain greater insight into the browsing habits and behaviors of website users so the marketing team can better target its efforts by emphasizing what works and reducing what isn’t.
