10 Best Practices for Hotel Website Design & Development

There are many advantages to making your hotel website your primary distribution channel. From cutting down on commission costs, to offering your guest a better booking experience, or completely controlling the first impression of your hotel.

Let’s look at the 10 best practices for hotel website design and development, to ensure your site not only stands out amongst competitors, but also converts.

1. Quality photos, videos, and maps

First of all, the visual elements on your website should be of fantastic quality! As hotels sell an experience, you want to impress your potential guests with stunning pictures of your property, rooms, and F&B outlets, so they only want to stay at your hotel.

2. Professional 'on brand' website design

Your website is the first touchpoint in the guest journey, so you have to make sure it makes a good impression. The way you present yourself online shows who you are as a company. Check that your design embodies your hotel’s brand identity, comes across as competent and trustworthy, and distinguishes you from competitors.

3. Effective use of colours and fonts

Choose a colour palette of max. 3-5 colours and max. 2-3 fonts. It should be aligned with your brand identity and make your photography really pop. It’s incredible how much impact the colours and fonts can have on the perception of your hotel.

4. Simple navigation

One of the biggest pet peeves when visiting a website is not being able to quickly navigate through the website. Users should be able to find the right information with as little clicks as possible. However, don’t overcrowd your main menu. Whether it’s a classic menu bar at the top or a full-screen popup. Keep the main categories simple.

5. User-friendly layout

Another major contributor to the usability of your website is the layout. Ensure that you create a good flow within your pages to effortlessly lead users through your website. Think about incorporating the often-used F- and Z-patterns to create a user-friendly layout.

6. Well-organised information

Another important attribute of your hotel website quality is ensuring that the information is well-organised. Suppose a visitor can’t find the information they’re looking for easily. In that case, chances are they will probably leave your website and look for the information elsewhere, like the website of an OTA. So, don’t use vague terms to refer to different pages, and make the information on the pages straightforward and free of any ‘room for interpretation’.

7. Responsive design

Hotel websites are visited from mobile devices more often compared to desktop. Therefore, ensure that your website design is responsive for different devices like laptops, tablets, and smartphones. You don’t want to lose any potential bookings because the website doesn’t work well on smartphones, so double-check your website on responsiveness.

8. Information about reservations

Another best practice for hotel website design and development is related to the core feature - reservations. Your website aims to generate bookings. And for your website to generate bookings, it has to provide all the information needed about the reservation. So think about clearly explaining the differences between room types. Present the applicable cancellation policies and incorporate a FAQ at the end of your page to answer the most common questions.

9. Include room prices

One advantage of the websites of OTAs is the inclusion of prices for every room type. This immediately shows the potential guest what they can expect, price-wise. As your hotel website probably uses an external booking engine, you can’t always offer live prices directly on your website, as with an OTA website. However, incorporate some sort of price point like a starting price, into the rooms page. This will ensure that your visitors don’t leave for an OTA immediately or have to go through the booking engine to see prices.

10. Showcase your promotions

OTAs often snatch the top search results on Google to advertise the sharpest prices for your hotels. So make sure that your hotel website highlights the one-of-a-kind promotions that you can’t get anywhere else. Everyone loves to get the best deal possible, so be sure to include special packages exclusively on your website.