A Global Culinary Icon, Digitally Transformed
Gordon Ramsay Restaurants, a world-renowned hospitality brand, was rapidly expanding across the UK, France, Italy, the USA, the Middle East, and Asia. However, their existing digital infrastructure was not equipped to support this growth. The challenge was to develop a cohesive global digital presence that could seamlessly manage multiple restaurant brands, facilitate online bookings, and boost sales of gift experiences and vouchers—all while delivering a best-in-class user experience.
The Potential
Gordon Ramsay Restaurants (GRR) is one of the UK’s most recognisable hospitality groups, spanning over 30 restaurants globally, from threeMichelin-starred icons to relaxed Street Burger and Street Pizza concepts and the Gordon Ramsay Academy. As the group prepared for ambitious international expansion across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, its digital foundations were holding it back.
The legacy website set‑up was a patchwork of disconnected systems: no true e-commerce, limited analytics, isolated email and voucher providers, and an over-reliance on third-party booking platforms like OpenTable. Each brand and region had its own way of working, leading to inconsistent experiences, fragmented data and missed marketing opportunities.
GRR didn’t just need a new website. It needed a scalable digital ecosystem that could power multiple brands, markets and revenue streams from table bookings to gift experiences and Academy courses and still feel seamless to guests.
The Insight
Today’s guests don’t experience Gordon Ramsay Restaurants one property at a time; they experience the brand as a connected world. They discover a Street Pizza on social, browse recipes from Restaurant GordonRamsay, buy a gift voucher for a friend, then book a course at the GordonRamsay Academy – often across different devices, locations and time zones.
To match that reality, GRR needed a digital experience that behaved like the best hospitality service: joined up, responsive and able to remember you. But that kind of experience isn’t possible when content, bookings, vouchers and data all live in silos. The opportunity was to create a single, global digital “kitchen” behind the scenes – one that could serve multiple brands and regions with local flavor, while keeping the core recipe for content, commerce and data consistent.
The Idea
Our idea was to turn the fragmented digital estate of Gordon RamsayRestaurants into a global, headless hub with one flexible core powering many distinctive experiences.
We designed and implemented a new, API-first architecture where a central content and data “brain” could feed multiple restaurant brands, regions and formats. Kontent.ai became the content backbone for the group; Booking Live provided a unified layer for bookings and experiences; and a dedicated GordonRamsay Academy platform was created for courses, recipes and video content. All of it was wired into a modern marketing stack across CRM, email, paid media and analytics.
Crucially, we didn’t just focus on technology. We worked across executive, marketing and operational teams in the UK and North America to alignKPIs, define shared measurement frameworks and build the behaviours needed to use this new ecosystem well – from how campaigns are briefed, to how results are reported, to how local teams activate content.
The result is a single digital foundation where gifts, bookings, Academy courses and content all work together to drive revenue, not in isolation.
The Technology
At the core of this transformation is Kontent.ai, implemented as headless, API-first CMS to power a truly global digital ecosystem.
The previous web stack lacked the flexibility and connectivity GRR needed. Content lived inside page templates. Vouchers, bookings, CRM and analytics each ran on separate systems with minimal integration. That meant duplication of effort, inconsistent brand execution and limited ability to reuse content – especially as new brands and regions came online.
With Kontent.ai, we designed a global hub model:
Headless and API-first
Content is created once inKontent.ai, structured into reusable models – such as dishes, locations, experiences, recipes, courses and brand stories – and delivered via APIs into multiple front-ends: flagship restaurant sites, Street Burger and Street Pizza, the Gordon Ramsay Academy and future brand or market launches.
Multi-brand, multi-region ready
A single Kontent.ai hub underpins a growing portfolio of more than 20 sites and brands. Global components – like core brand content, regulatory information and key campaigns– can be managed centrally, while local teams can adapt menus, offers and experiences to their markets.
Best-of-breed integrations
Kontent.ai sits at the centre of a modern stack that includes BookingLive for live availability and course/experience bookings, unified vouchers redeemable across restaurants and the Academy, Salesforce CRM, Alchemetrics and Dotdigital for marketing automation, Cloudinary as DAM, and a rebuilt GA/GTM set-up to capture e-commerce and campaign performance.
Built for hospitality pace
New restaurants, seasonal menus and campaigns can now be launched across markets without re-platforming or recreating content from scratch. Headless architecture gives GRR the freedom to evolve front-end experiences – from web to app to in-venue – while keeping content and data consistent behind the scenes.
By choosing Kontent.ai as a headless CMS, GRR now has a scalable digital kitchen: structured, reusable content feeding every brand touch point, integrated data across bookings and vouchers, and the headroom to keep expanding globally without rebuilding the foundations each time.
The Impact
The shift to a headless, hub-and-spoke model, and the marketing maturity that came with it, has delivered significant performance gains:
- +51% increase in on site conversion rates
- 68% decrease in table bookingCPA within six months
- +28% increase in gift experience sales
- +49% growth in combined SEO andPPC conversions
Gordon Ramsay Restaurants is now driving more direct bookings and voucher sales through owned channels, with a digital estate that can prove the value of every campaign.
Operationally, Gordon Ramsay Restaurants has moved from a collection of loosely connected sites to a genuinely unified digital organisation. Restaurant brands are now empowered with editorial ownership and the tools to activate locally, while still working within a clear global framework.
Marketing, digital, CRM and restaurant teams share a consistent view of performance across brands and markets, with integrated tracking and clearKPIs. Leaders can see the revenue impact of bookings, vouchers and campaigns across the portfolio, not just by channel or site. And as new markets come online, they plug into a proven pattern: one hub, many expressions.
In practice, that means less effort spent wrestling with technology and more time crafting the experiences guests actually see, whether that’s booking a table, buying a voucher or discovering a new concept in a new city.
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