Whether you’re running an upscale hotel or a budget hotel, there are a few things a hotel website must deliver to its guests. If you want yours to be successful, consider these best practices and design elements!
First and foremost, your hotel website must provide visitors with a clear path to booking directly. This means delivering rates and availability in real-time, making your reservation process simple and efficient.
User-friendly
Things a Hotel Website Must Deliver
User-friendly hotel websites must be easy to navigate and offer relevant information. They must also be mobile-friendly and include all necessary information, including types of rooms, room rates, and contact details.
Some hotel websites go beyond basic functionality and reserving rooms, delivering quality content that engages visitors. They highlight the unique culture of the property and the amenities they offer, resulting in increased sales.
This website design for Phos Villas uses a captivating background image and persuasive copy that will encourage users to book their stay immediately! The site also features several images of the hotel’s interiors and seascape views.
A hotel website needs to make it easy for customers to find what they need and connect with the brand, so they’ll return again and recommend it to friends and family. The best hotels and resorts take this into account when designing their website and incorporate intuitive navigation to ensure that guests can find what they need easily.
The hotel’s logo is visible throughout the site, while a traveling navigation bar with a CTA button to check availability is accompanied by a language option. It’s a simple way to get guests booking quickly, and the hotel’s phone number is listed on the side of the page for those who need more assistance.
This is an excellent example of how a hotel’s website can be visually appealing without being overwhelming, and this is something to consider for your own site. This website design features a scrollable carousel of images of the different rooms and suites, which makes it easy for users to find their ideal room.
It also has a cool parallax effect, which means that the photos roll across the screen, showing the hotel from all angles. The website’s color scheme is a perfect fit for the hotel’s interiors, and the layout allows users to find what they’re looking for with ease.
The hotel’s logo is also visible in the background of every page, giving the site a professional look. This helps guests feel like they are in the hands of a professional hotel that’s committed to their comfort and success. It also gives the site a strong brand identity, allowing it to stand out from the competition.
Responsive
Whether you’re a startup or an experienced hotel brand, a great hotel website design can set you apart from the competition. It should be able to deliver a positive experience that converts lookers into bookers, and ultimately earn you more direct bookings.
The best hotel websites deliver a seamless user experience, no matter the device being used to view it. This is achieved through responsive design, which automatically adjusts the layout, content, and menus to fit the size of any device it’s being viewed on.
With more people searching for hotels on their smartphones than desktop computers, a responsive design is vitally important for attracting guests to your property. It also allows you to easily update how your site looks on different devices.
For instance, you can use a carousel of high-resolution images to show off all the room types available at your hotel. This is a great way to demonstrate what the rooms are like, as well as showcase any amenities that the property may have available.
You can also make use of video content, although it should be used sparingly to avoid distracting visitors and overwhelming them. Videos should have good sound quality, transitions and animations to keep your audience engaged and compelled to read further.
In addition, you can include star ratings and testimonials to let prospective guests know about previous visitors’ experiences. This will not only help them decide if your hotel is the right choice for their stay, it can also encourage them to share their own experiences on social media.
Another key component of a hotel website is the ability to show live rates and availability for any date range. This can be a valuable tool for encouraging prospective guests to book directly through your hotel’s website, and it can also increase your search engine results page rankings.
A hotel website should load quickly, at least within a couple of seconds. This is crucial to reducing bounce rates and improving your search engine results page rankings.
Floating widgets are also useful for showing booking options, as they float throughout the screen and don’t clutter the rest of the website. This can be a great way to encourage visitors to book a room right away, and it can be used in conjunction with other key features such as a live chat or hotel chatbot to ensure that any questions a visitor has are answered quickly.
Easy to navigate
Guests often expect their hotels to provide them with easy-to-navigate and well-designed websites. If a hotel doesn’t deliver on this, they may leave a website and find one that is easier to use or more appealing.
Luckily, hotels have many ways to make their sites user-friendly and attractive, allowing them to convey the essence of their business in a way that entices potential guests to book a stay. Here are some examples of exemplary hotel website designs that get this right!
The Lake House – a luxury hotel with cookery courses, outdoor activities and a rustic country restaurant in Australia – is a great example of a hospitality brand that gets its website design right. Its homepage uses a full-width image of its architecture and design flourishes that showcases the hotel’s unique style in a visually-appealing way.
In addition to displaying its selling points as text over the images, it also features a travel navigation bar that makes it easy for guests to book a room. It’s togglable in four languages and includes a “Book Now” CTA button, ensuring a seamless user experience for future travelers.
Phos Villas – a collection of luxury villas in the Greek island of Phos – takes an innovative approach to hotel website design. On the homepage, the spheres that represent planets change to showcase images of the Phos landscape and surroundings, giving users an audiovisual journey that makes them feel like they’re on an exclusive holiday.
When visitors click on one of the spheres, they can view more information about the villa and find contact details. Another option is to take a parallax tour of the area and see how it looks from the sky.
Rather than using a fixed navigation menu, Priceline opts for a list of filters that allow users to narrow down the hotel search by amenities, star rating and neighborhood. They also have a steep-discount finder and a flag that shows properties with lower-than-average prices, making them a great choice for those seeking an affordable place to stay in a new location.
Easy to book
Whether you’re running a hotel, motel, bed and breakfast, or luxury resort, it is essential to create a website that will boost your business and help you grow. No matter your niche, you can use a hotel website builder to make it happen.
The design of your site should be easy to navigate and offer the information guests are looking for, such as room prices, special packages, and booking options. Making it as simple as possible for your guests to book a reservation is key to ensuring they stick with you once their stay is over.
Your hotel website should also be consistent with your brand. This means using complementary colors and fonts, keeping the design and user experience consistent with what visitors expect, and providing links to your social media channels.
To draw users in, you can display star ratings and reviews from third-party sources. These are an easy way to show off your hotel’s quality and give it a credibility boost.
You can also include video backgrounds on your hotel website design, which can be incredibly inspiring and encourage visitors to explore more. It is especially important to use a video background near the fold, since that is where most people see your page.
When you use video, your visitors will remain glued to your site for longer. They will be interested in your hotel and want to know more about it.
Another great hotel website design idea is to use parallax scrolling. It will keep your menu fixed to the screen as you scroll down, so that your readers can easily change their language or view other options without having to go back to the top of the page.
It’s also a good idea to add a spinner to your navigation menu, so that your visitors can quickly see what numbers are coming up when they tap on certain pages of your site. This will help them navigate your website better and keep them on your page longer, which can lead to a sale.
No matter your hotel’s style, you can create a website that is both elegant and functional with a hotel website builder. These tools are designed to help you build a page that is easy to navigate and features a clean, pixel-perfect layout that will appeal to your customers.