James and Tamara Lohan (co-founders of Mr and Mrs Smith) reveal the strategies that have kept their hotel booking platform going in an increasingly competitive market �" keep it 'niche', harness the power of content and strive for the best customer service both online and offline.

The digital environment is rife with hotel booking websites, with titans like Booking.com and Expedia dominating the market. Mr & Mrs Smith’s key point of difference lies in its curation of hotels.

“Our curation is second to none so when you come to us, we’ve sorted all the wheat from the chaff. You can’t buy your way into our collection,” says James Lohan, co-founder and executive chairman.

Their ambition of creating a guide that could communicate to customers like a close friend has resulted in a quirky collection of over 1,000 luxury and boutique hotels, and a recent expansion into luxury private accommodation.

This idiosyncratic ‘voice’ describing each hotel has made the site one of the first to embrace content as a way to connect directly and personally with their consumers �" long before content became the ‘in vogue’ marketing tool it is today.

“The way that we give ‘insider details’, I hope, is an interesting read in its slightly irreverent tone. There aren’t many other sites where you can really trust the recommendations on the best rooms, the best table in a restaurant,” says James.

You could say Mr & Mrs Smith has mastered the art of storytelling as a means of directly engaging with and relating to customers. To create these stories (and to add to their credibility), James says, “We thought it’d be interesting to get people who are frankly more interesting than a hotel inspector… you go away and you just tell us your story for 48 hours.

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