WEBSITES · HOTELS
A hotel website that sells without the middleman
Every booking through an intermediary costs a hotel 15 to 25 per cent of the room rate. Here is what a hotel site needs so guests book directly with you — shown on Hotel Aurelia.
A hotel website has a single job: to bring the guest to a booking made directly with the hotel, not through an intermediary. Every reservation that goes through Booking.com costs the hotel between 15 and 25 per cent of the room rate. In a 60-room hotel that is a gap wide enough for the website to pay for itself in the first season.
For the concept Hotel Aurelia — a seaside hotel established in 1927 — we built a site that takes the guest to the “Book” button without detours, while keeping the impression that makes the hotel worth its rate.
Mistake number one: the hotel sells rooms, the guest buys a stay
Most hotel sites open with a list of rooms and rates per night. That is an intermediary’s logic, not a hotel’s. The intermediary sells the cheapest available room; the hotel sells a morning on the terrace, dinner, the sauna, quiet.
So Aurelia opens with what it is like to be there: one large full-screen photograph, one sentence, one button. The room list arrives only once the guest is already inside — by then the question is which room, not whether at all.
What a hotel site has to have
- Every room as its own story — floor area, view, bed, what is included, a gallery. Not a table.
- A visible ‘from’ price. A guest who cannot find a price does not send an e-mail — they go back to Booking.
- What is inside the hotel: restaurant, spa, pool, function rooms. These are the reasons for a higher rate and for a longer stay.
- Packages. A weekend for two, half board, a family break. A package is the only way to sell something the intermediary does not have.
- Location and the journey — a map, distance from the airport, parking.
- Booking in one step, reachable from anywhere on the site.
Hotel Aurelia — seaside hotel, est. 1927
Full-screen photography, rooms with ‘from’ prices, spa and restaurant, packages and a booking bar that stays within reach the whole time.
Open the demo →The booking system: what the real options are
A hotel has three routes and each one has its price:
- An existing booking engine embedded in the site. Quickest, a monthly subscription, and the look is partly limited by whatever the provider allows.
- A booking system through an interface (API) — availability and rates come out of the system, while the whole experience is ours. More expensive, but the site stays one piece from the first page to the last.
- An enquiry instead of a booking. Often the best answer for smaller hotels and boutique houses: a form that sends the dates, the number of guests and any requests straight to reception. Less machinery, more personal contact.
The same rule applies to all three: the connection to the channel manager has to be in order, otherwise you will sell a room that has already gone through an intermediary.
Why speed matters more for hotels than elsewhere
Hotel sites are full of large photographs — which is exactly why they are often among the slowest on the web. A guest looking for a room has five tabs open. The one that loads last is the one closed first.
Our approach: photographs in modern formats at several sizes for different screens, the first image loaded immediately, the rest only as they come into view, no video on mobile devices. Aurelia appears on a mobile network in under two seconds, even though it looks like a magazine.
Several languages is not translation, it is markets
A hotel in this part of Europe has guests from Germany, Italy and Austria. That means more
than translated text: it means separate page addresses for every language and
correct hreflang tags, so that Google shows the German version to a German guest.
Without them all the languages compete against each other in the same search results and none
of them wins.
A hotel without its own booking is renting its own guest. The website is the only place where the guest becomes yours.
What follows after launch
A hotel site is not a project that finishes. Every season brings new packages, new rates, new photographs. So each hotel gets an editor where it changes prices, packages and galleries itself — without calling us and without waiting.
If you are considering a new site for a hotel, apartments or a glamping site, look at the demo and write to us about what would have to be different in your case. The first conversation is free and usually takes half an hour.