Glenora Inn &
Glen Breton Distillery
A complete revamp of glenoradistillery.com, built to grow direct online bookings
Glenora is an inn, dining room and distillery tour in Glenville, Cape Breton — the home of Glen Breton, Canada’s first single malt whisky. We rebuilt glenoradistillery.com around one job: turning visitors into direct bookings instead of commission-paying third-party reservations.
Direct bookings
+35%
Year over year, reducing reliance on third-party booking platforms
Google rating
4.4★
From 890 guest reviews, now shown live on the homepage
Partnership
5 years
Three web properties, one continuous relationship
The situation
A beautiful place to stay, and a website that made booking it harder than it needed to be.
The old glenoradistillery.com opened on a full-screen photograph with a paragraph of text and a row of small links. Booking a room meant spotting “Book Now” among six of them, then leaving the site for a separate reservation page.
Meanwhile, bookings were flowing through third-party platforms that charged commission on every stay and put a layer between Glenora and its guests.
What we did
Strategy first, then a website built around the booking.
Strategic advising — repositioning as Glen Breton Distillery
The distillery was named Glenora; the whisky people knew and asked for was Glen Breton. We advised on aligning the visitor-facing business with the brand already on the bottle — so the name a traveller searches, the name on the label and the name above the door finally agree. The business now trades as Glenora Inn & Glen Breton Distillery.
A homepage built around the booking
We rebuilt glenoradistillery.com around a single job: turning a visitor into a direct booking. An availability search now sits in the homepage hero, above the fold, connected to WebRez — so the booking journey begins the moment someone arrives rather than behind a small link. Accommodation, dining and distillery tours are presented as one visit rather than three competing choices.
Direct bookings grew 35% year over year, with every one of them arriving without commission attached.
Reducing friction
We simplified menus and navigation: fewer top-level choices, clearer paths, and a shorter distance between arriving and doing the thing — booking a room, reserving a table or joining a tour. Most conversion gains on sites like these come from removing steps rather than adding features.
Reviews where guests decide
Live Google reviews from Glenora’s Business Profile now appear on the homepage and update automatically — hundreds of real guest reviews, right where visitors are deciding whether to book.
Photography
We art-directed location, dining and lifestyle photography at the Inn and distillery. Cape Breton’s landscape and a working distillery are genuine assets — the photography exists so the site can use them to sell a stay, not simply to decorate pages.
Five years, and still going
This was never a website project. It has been an ongoing relationship across brand strategy, booking, photography and seasonal campaigns — with the work shifting as the business has.
The same partnership covers the whisky side of the business. See how Glen Breton went from no direct sales to a quarter of the business.
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