Outline:
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, having an exceptional online presence is essential for any business, and achieving the best hotel website design has become a necessity in the hotel industry. A well-designed website not only attracts potential guests but also plays a pivotal role in converting them into loyal customers. With the ever-increasing competition in the hospitality sector, it is crucial for hoteliers to craft a website that stands out and meets the needs of discerning travelers. In this article, we will explore the essential elements of the best hotel website design, offering insights and tips to help you create a captivating and user-friendly online platform that will set your property apart from the rest.
So, whether you’re a seasoned hotelier or just starting your journey in the hospitality world, let this guide be your compass to navigate the intricacies of designing a hotel website that leaves a lasting impression.
20 Best Practices of Excellent Hotel Website Design
Travelers tend to choose visually appealing and functional websites that load quickly and offer an easy booking process. If your hotel website lacks these essential features, potential guests may skip your site and miss out on the excellent B&B service you have to offer. To avoid losing potential customers, it is crucial to include some essential features in your hotel web design strategy. By following these practices, you can leverage your business and increase revenue effortlessly.
Display Your Brand Identity
To display your brand identity effectively, you need to have a clear understanding of what sets your business apart from others in the same industry. This involves identifying your unique selling proposition (USP), which is the factor that makes your service stand out from the rest. For instance, it could be your focus on sustainability or your commitment to providing exceptional customer service.
Once you have identified your USP, you can incorporate it into your brand identity. This includes developing a brand voice and tone that aligns with your values and resonates with your target audience. You can also create a brand logo and color scheme that reflects your brand personality and makes your service easily recognizable.
To truly connect with your audience, you can also share your brand story. This includes your business’s history, values, and mission, as well as any notable achievements or milestones. By telling a compelling story, you can build an emotional connection with your audience, creating a loyal customer base that is invested in your success.
Overall, displaying your brand identity is essential for building a strong and recognizable brand. By showcasing what makes your service unique, you can attract more customers and create a lasting impression that sets you apart from the competition.
Polish the Layout
Your hotel website should be easy to navigate to provide a frictionless booking process. A cluttered layout can discourage visitors from reaching the reservation page and push them to look for other more user-friendly platforms. It’s critical to choose a simple layout that is comprehensive and digestible, finding a balance between design and function.
From the homepage, users should be able to scan the information in a few seconds without getting lost in the details of elaborate layout formats. It’s crucial to present links to the most desirable pages, such as rooms, photos, services, and a “contact us” page. For better clarity, you can employ a visual hierarchy or incorporate a grid, highlighting major navigational touchpoints that lead the user towards the desired action effortlessly.
In addition to a simple and comprehensive layout, you should also pay attention to the color scheme and typography of your hotel website. The color palette should be consistent and match the overall brand identity of your hotel. It’s essential to choose colors that evoke emotions and complement the atmosphere of your hotel.
When it comes to typography, make sure to choose legible and easy-to-read fonts. Consider the size, spacing, and contrast between the text and background to ensure maximum readability. Also, it’s important to maintain consistency in font style and size throughout the website to avoid confusion and enhance the overall user experience.
Another crucial aspect to consider is the loading speed of your website. A slow-loading website can lead to high bounce rates and negatively affect your search engine ranking. To avoid this, optimize your website’s images, videos, and other content for faster loading times.
Finally, make sure to test your hotel website across different devices and browsers to ensure it’s responsive and functional. With more and more people accessing the internet on their smartphones and tablets, it’s crucial to have a mobile-friendly website that provides an excellent user experience across all devices.
By paying attention to these additional elements, you can further polish the layout of your hotel website and create a more seamless and enjoyable user experience for your potential guests.
Facilitate the Booking Procedure
Your ultimate goal is to boost direct booking conversions, which means designing your website to make the reservation process as easy as possible. Start by providing visitors with a clear path to the booking procedure and placing prominent CTA buttons throughout your website. Incorporate an intuitive layout and eye-catching visuals that highlight your hotel’s unique selling points. It’s crucial to avoid being too pushy and instead focus on quality rather than quantity when offering incentives.
Once you’ve directed visitors to the booking engine, make sure it’s optimized for a hassle-free experience. Ensure that the engine is mobile-responsive and fast-loading, as more and more users are booking through mobile devices. Avoid time-consuming email inquiries and opt for direct and automated ways of completing reservations that encompass all available search filters. Integrate secure payment options and provide real-time availability and pricing updates. This simplifies the booking process and guarantees high accessibility of your services, leading to a positive user experience. Additionally, consider including social proof, such as reviews and testimonials, to build trust and credibility with potential guests.
Make Contact Information Easy to Find
To make it easy for users to contact you directly, highlight your contact information and make it easily accessible from any page of your website. Rather than burying it in the footer, ensure users can find it quickly without having to scroll through numerous pages. Consider adding a floating contact button, live chat support, or a chatbot that can answer common questions and provide assistance 24/7. This ensures that potential guests can reach out to your team without any hassle, increasing the likelihood of direct bookings. Additionally, include social media icons linked to your hotel’s profiles, allowing users to connect with your brand on various platforms and stay updated with your latest offers and news.
Show Authentic Photos of Rooms and Amenities
When guests visit your website, they want to see what to expect from your B&B service, including images of your apartments and amenities. It’s crucial to display only authentic and high-quality visuals that evoke credibility in your service. To achieve this, display multiple photos with informative descriptions while optimizing them to avoid damaging website speed. Consider incorporating virtual tours, 360-degree images, or video content to provide an immersive and engaging experience for your visitors. Showcasing different room types, common areas, and any unique features of your property can help potential guests envision their stay and make an informed decision.
Additionally, highlight the location and surrounding attractions, as this can be a major selling point for many travelers. Include information about nearby points of interest, dining options, and transportation, as well as an interactive map to help guests plan their visit. By offering a comprehensive and visually appealing overview of your B&B and its surroundings, you can effectively convey the value of your service and entice guests to book with you.
Craft a Profound Visual Experience
While room pictures and amenities provide necessary information about your service, it’s the overall visual appeal of your website that will stimulate and inspire your visitors. Choose images that accurately convey the mood and tone of your business and appeal to your guests’ emotional side by showcasing beautiful photos of people enjoying your hotel. Incorporate professional, high-quality photography and consider utilizing video content to give visitors a virtual tour of your property. These images serve as proof that your B&B service is worth experiencing and can convince online visitors to book a stay and immerse themselves in the wonderful atmosphere they’ve already seen in photos. Additionally, create a visually appealing and easy-to-navigate website layout that complements your branding and reflects your hotel’s unique identity. Utilize whitespace effectively to avoid clutter, and choose typography and color schemes that align with your brand and evoke the desired emotions in your target audience.
Include Video Content
Video content and short films have the power to captivate users and create emotional resonance, keeping them engaged on your website for longer periods. Consider shooting videos showcasing nearby tourist attractions, telling an engaging story, or simply showcasing your rooms and services. High-resolution visuals paired with breathtaking audio can leave a lasting impression on your viewers. However, it’s important to strike a balance between functionality and beauty and ensure that these videos are optimized and don’t negatively impact your website’s usability.
Build Creative Landing Pages with Prominent CTAs
To increase your online visibility, consider creating multiple landing pages filled with diverse content. Each landing page should be unique and feature a clear CTA that stands out from the rest of your website. Instead of using a generic “book now” CTA, experiment with different language and design options to make it more appealing, such as “stay with us.” Being creative and making a favorable first impression on potential guests can go a long way in boosting conversions.
Adhere to a Responsive Web Design Approach
As mobile devices account for half of internet traffic, responsive design is essential for making your website flexible and highly accessible to potential customers, improving both their experience and your search engine ranking results. Ensure that your content is consistent across both desktop and mobile versions, including structured data and metadata, and use descriptive alt texts for images on mobile devices. Check that your URLs are correct and updated for mobile and avoid fragmented URLs that can damage your website’s performance.
Visual content must be of the same high quality on both desktop and mobile versions, and ads should not harm mobile users’ experience. Pay attention to ad positioning, as what works for desktop may not work for mobile devices. Responsive web design is not just about mobile devices but providing a seamless user experience without any significant discrepancy between versions of the website.
Optimize Your SEO
Keywords are a significant part of your website’s SEO performance, as they make your content more visible and targeted. By including keywords related to your B&B service, such as wedding packages, business center, or eco-friendly, in your website content, you can significantly improve your SEO performance. Additionally, using geo-targeted keywords like “Denver B&B” or “hotel in Washington” helps attract guests searching for accommodations in your area.
Readability is also a crucial factor in your ranking, so make sure your content is easily readable and comprehensive. Use contrastive colors for typography and background to improve readability. Simple navigation, clean URLs, and eliminating duplications also help search engine crawlers navigate your site more efficiently and improve user experience, increasing dwell time, which is a ranking factor.
Finally, using sitemaps to organize your content helps search engines evaluate your site more efficiently, ensuring that nothing significant escapes their attention. By following these additional tips, you can optimize your SEO and improve your online visibility, attracting more potential guests to your B&B service.
Provide Social Proof and Analyze It Regularly
People often rely on other people’s experiences when making a reservation, so having reviews and recommendations available is essential. Creating a review page on your website or enabling guests to share their experiences on your social media accounts can help increase consumer confidence and connect with your target customers.
Social media is a valuable asset for the travel industry, providing a platform to interact with guests and understand their preferences. You can ask for feedback directly through Instagram or set up a Facebook poll to gather opinions on new service features you plan to incorporate. Analyzing this feedback can help you make informed decisions about improving your service and creating a more productive guest experience. By using social media to encourage friendly relationships with potential guests, you can create a positive reputation for your B&B service even before they arrive.
Include Reviews from Third Parties
Maintain objectivity and realism about your hotel business, identify what sets you apart from competitors, and understand your strengths and weaknesses to improve your reputation. You can also boost your credibility and trust by getting feedback from authoritative third parties in the travel niche, such as Booking, Tripadvisor, or Trustpilot. Placing your listings on these platforms can generate thousands of new reviews, increase recognition, and boost conversions. Employ an appealing and well-structured badge or widget to display on external sources for the best results.
Set Up Live Chatbots
Implementing live chat widgets or chatbots can enhance online communication with potential guests and showcase your hospitality. This feature can reduce expenditures on full-time offline support and handle primitive tasks while answering users’ questions, providing recommendations, or directing guests toward desired actions. Such assistance can accelerate the decision-making process and eliminate any confusion that may occur before, during, or after the booking procedure. By setting up live chatbots, you can enhance the overall user experience and increase the likelihood of direct bookings.
Enable Multilingual Option
To attract a global audience and enter foreign markets, it’s important to make your website accessible to people from different countries and speaking various languages. Providing a multilingual option is imperative for breaking down language barriers and expanding your customer base.
Implement VR
Virtual reality is no longer just for entertainment but has become a valuable tool in the travel industry. Providing 360-degree VR room tours on your website can increase user engagement and boost credibility. This feature allows users to see your B&B service in great detail and can help increase customer reassurance before they book a stay. By implementing VR, you can provide a more immersive experience for potential guests and set yourself apart from competitors. Additionally, you can showcase your hotel’s amenities, such as the pool, gym, spa, and dining areas, in a visually compelling way that invites users to explore further. Including neighborhood highlights and nearby attractions with VR can also give potential guests a better understanding of the location and its surroundings, further enhancing their decision-making process.
As VR technology continues to advance, consider integrating interactive elements that enable users to personalize their virtual tours, such as choosing different room types or viewing various points of interest. This level of interactivity will not only provide a richer experience but also demonstrate your commitment to meeting the evolving needs of modern travelers.
Be User-Friendly
To attract and retain users, your website must be user-friendly, not just visually appealing. This means it should have a fast loading speed and high functionality, making it easy for users to navigate and perform tasks.
Transform Your Website Into a Local Resource
Your bed and breakfast website can be more than just a platform for booking stays. By starting a blog and providing insights into travel, including relevant information about the local environment, shopping attractions, and events, you can transform your website into a valuable local travel guide. This will increase user engagement and make your website a one-stop-shop for travelers.
Practice Lazy Loading
Since hotel websites usually include a lot of visual content and room descriptions, managing them incorrectly can result in slow loading times, which can drive away potential guests and harm your search engine ranking. Lazy loading can help minimize load times by loading content only when it becomes visible in the viewport, thus preventing the website from getting stuck due to a large amount of content being loaded at once.
Ensure High Accessibility for Everyone
According to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, every website should be accessible to all users who want to experience it. This means that the platform should be perceivable, operable, and readable for people with disabilities and impairments. In other words, it should be ADA-compliant. Since the Americans with Disabilities Act requires the inclusion of assistive technologies in website performance, you need to consider the following:
- create alt tags for all images, videos, and audio files
- include text transcripts for video and audio content
- classify the site’s language in the header code
- use text-to-speech screen readers and keyboard navigation
- offer multiple alternatives for experiencing the content
This ensures that your website meets the standards of growing global consciousness and welcomes all customer groups regardless of their limited opportunities. Otherwise, you risk losing a vast number of potential customers and significant revenue due to penalization.
Make Your Website Easily Updatable
Since your rates may change, rooms may undergo renovations, or new features added, it is critical to make your website flexible in terms of updates. Any input should not damage the overall structure of your platform or impact users’ experience. It should enable you to easily and quickly make changes to the content of your pages. To manage that, you need to choose an appropriate Content Management System. It allows for content changes without having to dive into the code. Thus, you have better chances of making updates without ruining the performance you already have.
Since the process may seem overwhelming, and you don’t want to focus on so many things simultaneously, you can seek assistance from Ester Digital. We will help you create a hotel website of your dreams, ensuring it meets all the requirements and standards.
Best Hotel Web Design Examples
The best way to create an excellent hotel website is to search for inspiration. Brilliant examples will encourage your creativity, helping you to manage the issue. Here are the best hotel website designs to admire:
Phos Villas
Even the hotel website can be a masterpiece, and Phos Villas B&B platform proves it. The design goes far beyond the simple functionality of the booking service, also creating an exceptional user experience, impressing viewers with beautiful audiovisual features.
Its stunning homepage design catches attention right from the moment you see it. It is decorated with spheres that remind us of planets circling our universe in their constant journey. The design perfectly fits the brand identity, going hand-in-hand with the tone and mood of the Phos brand. If you look at the logo, you can notice the same elements in it. A circle and a small wave fully transmit the sea hotel business essence, making it transparent for the guests.
Although being packed with so many visual elements, the website still loads fast and provides impeccable functionality. It uses a lazy load so that users can scroll through all the interactive and complex design elements without having to wait too long for the content loading.
Bellevue Syrene
The exquisite design of Bellevue Syrene’s website offers users engaging storytelling enhanced with lovely typography and captivating photos. Although the platform employs numerous overlapping design elements and sophisticated layouts, the soft color palette perfectly fits the essence of the business and makes the overall design look light. Besides, the website invites guests to click on buttons between images to change them. The transition is smooth due to the motion effects so that it is easy to scroll through the content.
Another great feature of the website is the fixed side menu that enables excellent navigation. It allows visitors to effortlessly move across the pages and find what they need in just one click. Such a user-friendly interface lets users explore the website at their own pace and leisure.
Hotel Schweizerhof Zermatt
Another inspirational hotel website is Schweizerhof Zermatt. The design is simple yet impressive. The homepage features a beautiful image with a loud incentivizing “explore Zermatt” statement. As you scroll down, you can enjoy delicate hand-drawn background sketches of flowers and wildlife paired with a color palette of pastel shades. Thus, the design perfectly suits the essence of a brand, turning the platform into a representative number one of the Zermatt hotel business.
One thing we liked about the website is a consistent storytelling that inspires new guests and showcases the best of its services.
Besides, there is an interactive cursor in the form of a dot that follows you as you browse the web pages. Here you can notice a prominent CTA button fixed at the side of the screen. It opens out when you hover it, allowing you to view rooms or explore the restaurant and spa services without going through multiple pages or to the footer.
Sol Beach Club
As soon as you land on the Sol Beach Club website homepage, you can utterly experience all the beauty of this place. The power of this website design is in an audiovisual effect that follows the users throughout their web journey. The jungle sounds with leaves rustling and birds singing excite and evoke only positive emotions.
The website is rich in visuals that capture the guests chatting and launching with sincere joy and powerful energy. You immediately get the impression of a lively and amusing vacation to spend here. The effect is enhanced with a perfectly chosen color palette that fully transmits the tone and mood of its nature-focused hotel service.
Another refreshing take is the presentation of the hotel crew you find when you scroll down the pages. It includes images of the people involved in the service with the bio introducing them. It increases credibility and urges users to sympathize with them, and fosters a good first impression.
The Plaza Hotel
Since its debut in 1907, Plaza Hotel remains an icon well-known all over the world, and its website fully reflects the gracefulness and magic of the place. As you arrive on the website, it welcomes you with a beautiful photo of the property, transporting you right in the city downtown. Another exceptional feature of Plaza Hotel’s web design is the typography. The fonts with their shapes and styles perfectly combine traditional elegance with a modern sensibility. The website is highly digestible and transparent. As you scroll down, you can find all the necessary information, including contact details, special offers column, and social media links.
Bella Vista
The Bella Vista website transports you to the south of Italy with its breathtaking sea views and authentic atmosphere. Moving down the homepage, users can fully experience the beauty of the place with a set of bright, sunny pictures, gradually exposing themselves with a smooth parallax scrolling.
Besides the perfect visual, the website design is highly functional. Right from its homepage, the platform features a polished comprehensive booking form and a prominent ‘book now’ button. At the bottom, there is a live chat widget that allows you to get some specific piece of information easily and quickly.
The Ritz Carlton Hotels
An American multinational Ritz-Carlton Hotels company operates more than 100 luxury hotels and resorts, and its website aims to represent them all. The platform employs primarily minimalist web design, but it is still elegant and highly functional. It offers multiple sections where users can explore the service according to the location it is situated. Due to its international popularity, the website enables a robust multilingual option with a wide choice of languages.
Hotel Casangelina
Although the Hotel Casangelina website design is primarily minimalist, it captivates and stirs imagination from the very first moments.
The platform welcomes users with a stunning video with inspiring background storytelling. The video exhibits a vibrant hotel panorama, the beauty of the local area, and people who enjoy their vacations here. It can’t but evoke warm emotions and excitement, allowing users to plunge into the atmosphere and feel the hotel’s elegance right from the screen.
Another exceptional point of this hotel website design is a coherent fusion of the images, fonts, and colors. All of them blend perfectly, merging into a delightful and smooth website browsing experience.
Refinery Hotel
The simple black and white yet impressive design of the Refinery Hotel website draws attention immediately. The homepage welcoming video catches the eyes of website visitors. At the same time, it doesn’t distract users because of the minimal movement and action to view. Tranquil background visual helps to draw the focus on a simple reservation form placed at the center.
Also, the muted tones of the video go well with the overall look of the site. Such a perfect alliance makes the website look elegant and sophisticated.
Babington House
The Babington House website entices users right from the homepage with a magnificent image. The bright, high-quality shot of the property makes you feel like you’re already there. The image then turns into a video that invites and discloses the beauty of the hotel.
Apart from the excellent visual side, the website is well-structured and easy to navigate. The fixed menu doesn’t let users get lost and enables them to switch between the pages easily. As scrolling downward, the site gives travelers a closer look at what the property includes. There is a short yet informative description below each amenity photo so that it becomes clear what the hotel can suggest to its guests and what to expect from it.
Elivi Hotels
Elivi Hotels website does a great job of employing a soft yet bright color scheme that brings all design elements together. It creates a holistic user experience when exploring the website. The refreshing take here is the nature-inspired design that employs numerous images of the surrounding environment as well as the hand-drawn illustrations of geese around the pages. It features an eye-catching CTA on the top of the left corner that fits the design yet stands out with the help of the contrastive blue color.
Hotel Marina
When you arrive at the Hotel Marina website, you see an elegant and polished landing page with bold contrasting typography that draws your attention instantly. Other pages contain typography, which is made up of different styles and sizes to ensure visual hierarchy. It makes the content highly digestible and readable. Another powerful touch is the multilingual option that allows travelers from all over the globe to make reservations without constraints. It exhibits the user-friendly approach the Hotel Marina website adheres to.
The hotel website design is cohesive throughout all the web pages, thanks to the unified color scheme, typography, and layout. Each page has a clean and simple aesthetic, made up of softly colored rectangles that arrange the content into digestible sections.
On a Final Note
All the examples mentioned above showcase stunning and unique designs, but they share some common web design trends that can elevate your hotel website to new heights. These elements include a captivating background photo or panoramic video of your resort, engaging storytelling techniques, parallax scrolling, strategically placed CTA buttons and menus, and a visually dominant presentation. While these features alone don’t guarantee success, combining them with factors like competitive pricing and a desirable location can make a world of difference.
Unlock the full potential of your hotel by highlighting the best experiences you have to offer in a seamless, user-friendly manner. The simpler it is for users to book a room, the more likely they are to become loyal guests. Keep in mind that your hotel website is the first impression you create for potential customers, so make it count! By implementing these best practices, you can ensure your hotel’s online presence is nothing short of extraordinary.
Still uncertain about your hotel website design or looking for expert insights? Don’t hesitate to contact us! We’re here to provide you with all the essential information and support you need to craft the perfect website that captivates your guests and drives bookings. Let us help you transform your online presence and set your hotel apart from the competition.
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