Luxury food recommendations at your fingertips
Whether it’s a birthday, an anniversary or merely a Friday night in the city, any occasion calls for good food. But, with so many restaurants of so many specialities to choose from, settling on a place to eat can be exhausting in itself. While the obvious solution might be to navigate Google for “places to eat near me”, wouldn’t it be ideal if there was a search engine – or, better yet, an app – dedicated to finding the very best restaurants, as recommended by experts? Well, now, there is: following the success of their website, which we recently gave a modern refresh, the Luxury Restaurant Guide (LRG) has launched a beautiful new app to help you find excellent gourmet recommendations for eating in, dining out or at special events. Oh, and we built the app, too.
The challenge
Reinforcing brand identities
As mentioned, we previously collaborated with LRG to develop their new and improved site, which launched at the precipice of the global pandemic. Although a challenging time for many industries, including hospitality, the latest site has seen significant growth in traffic, page views and returning visitors; all the more reason to reinforce the brand.
Like the website, a priority for this project was creating a seamless user journey. The prevalence of modern technology means that customers seek fast yet flawless experiences, especially if they are paying for a premium product. Hence, speed, ease of use and gratification were significant factors in developing the new LRG app.
Our success in integrating Laravel into LRG’s website development incited us to use it for the app development, too. A leading developer’s choice for building modern, full-stack web applications, we knew we could rely on Laravel to deliver the customer experience we and LRG were after. As for the frontend interface, we opted for React Native as its progressive nature allows for a smooth user journey, integrated with Salesforce to activate the membership system.
The solution
Extending the luxury experience
The LRG app is accessible to both regular users keen to try fine dining and loyal customers subscribed to the Luxury Restaurant Club (LRC). Therefore, we collaboratively decided to enable each customer to filter their searches by selecting a set of parameters, be it cuisine (i.e. Argentinian, café or vegan), awards (i.e. Michelin Star, AA Rosettes or Les Grandes Tables du Monde) or style (i.e. fine dining, pop up or gluten- and dairy-free), to name a few. This enhances the user experience by generating speedy results, facilitating their luxury restaurant search and navigation across the app.
For LRC members, we wanted to extend the luxury dining experience to the app to keep them informed, intrigued and inspired. The LRC treats its members to several benefits, including savings of up to 50% off and exclusive gourmet event invitations, so we wanted to make accessing such benefits as smooth as possible by optimising location technology. Namely, when the LRC member is near their selected restaurant, the app pings a notification reminding them to redeem their voucher.
The results
A promising trajectory
With both the website and app now in full swing, LRG is only forecasted for continued success. There’s no denying that they both ooze luxury in their design, offering and user experience, especially the app which club members have already shown appreciation for. One user shared:
What a fab app! Can’t wait to be out and about again finding all these wonderful places as I’m on the move. Looks amazing LRG!
As we return to normality post-COVID, we are sure customers will indulge in the app as much as they do the recommendations they find through the LRG.
Have an amazing idea for an app but not sure where to start? Start with Lightflows. Contact us today and we’ll explain how we can deliver the same luxury experience for your next project.
