Think about a typical day in your hotel. Are you likely to allow guests to wander the halls until they ﬁnd what they need? Would you show them a fuzzy, decade-old photograph when they asked to see the pool? Would you start a tour of the property in the car park?

Those scenarios might sound far-fetched, but all too often they are being replicated online. Hotel websites are failing to live up to the hospitality experience oﬀered in the lobby.

Given the huge shift to booking travel online — Euromonitor International expects 44% of travel sales and bookings to occur online during the next ﬁve years, four times more than in the retail industry — the current standard is not up to scratch. Your website, not your lobby, is increasingly your ﬁrst chance to leave a lasting impression on guests. You need to be sure you are making the right one.

How can you make that happen?
A good place to start is with the user experience design, often referred to as UX, of your website. With the help of experts in this ﬁeld, this report will explore the core principles you should adhere to and the process involved in building a successful website. We’ll also see what we can learn from others in the industry.

Your customers are used to seamless online interactions through the likes of Uber and Amazon, so expectations are sky high. Getting the basics right can go a long way to winning them over. Now is the time to bring hospitality all the way to your website.

What is user experience design?

It’s not diﬃcult to understand why having a good website is important. What’s trickier to comprehend is exactly what makes a high-quality online experience. UX design can mean many things to many people and incorporates a slew of disciplines including usability, information architecture and visual design, but there is at least some agreement around its aim. The deﬁnition below is what we’ve used as the foundation for this report.

UX 101: The core principles

Authenticity and compelling content
A good website needs some good old-fashioned storytelling. Your website should be built around what it is your hotel stands for and what you want to tell guests. Many UX experts recommend ﬁrst deﬁning this via content such as text, images or video. That content will then dictate the way information is ordered, the style of the site and the systems you employ. The more original it is, the better your website is likely to do on search engines like Google.

Information architecture
This refers to the way you present the information you want to communicate online. You might want to reference the hotel itself, the rooms, the restaurant and spa, but a user coming to your site cold has to know how to easily ﬁnd all those details.

This sounds like something you can work out through logic, but Tom Woodel, a user experience designer and instructor for General Assembly, says it’s worth testing thoroughly. “Trying to pretend you’re the user doesn’t work,” he says. “Anything you can do to get actual users testing your site is the best thing you could possibly do.” He suggests trying methods like card sorting, explained overleaf.

Quality visuals
It sounds obvious, but the importance of high-quality visuals can’t be overstated. Images hold huge sway with customers: 87% of respondents in a Fuel Travel and Flip.to survey said they are inﬂuenced by them during the booking process. Tristam Goch of web design and development studio Damn Fine explains: “Having low-quality visuals on your site might seem like a small thing on its own, but they could create a sense of uneasiness.” Lastly, make sure your pictures are optimised for use online. If not they could keep your web pages from loading.

Interaction with booking engine
Neil Gardiner, managing director of London-based UX design agency Every Interaction, came across the issue when creating a brand new website for the São Lourenço do Barrocal estate in Portugal. If you want a consistent user experience across your website, you need to work with a booking engine that has the ability to match the look and feel you’ve created, he says. “You can’t go through all these lovely pages to be kicked out into a payment or booking experience that jars. It’s got to be seamless. It’s deﬁnitely worth doing your homework.

Responsiveness
This is the term used to describe web pages that can adapt according to the device you’re using. In other words a browser should still get the best viewing experience regardless of screen size or orientation. UX designers say this is the minimum expected of a website today and, in fact, if your website is not responsive it will be ranked lower by Google than websites that are. Google has a tool to test how mobile-friendly your site is. Visit hWps://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly to try it.

Usability
This is a catch-all word that sums up how easy your website is to use. Tom Woodel says an easy way to measure that is against the 10 heuristic principles as outlined by Jakob Nielsen. They include things like the visibility of system status, in other words keeping users informed through visual cues and feedback, and helping users recognise, diagnose and recover from errors. A quick way to check how your website is faring is to install a UX plug-in to your internet browser — Google Chrome’s is called UX Check — and you’ll get a report.

Accessibility
Some design features are not suitable for all audiences. For example, fast-changing or animated images can cause problems for people with vestibular disorders. You can make sure your website caters for all audiences by checking the the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It’s also worth being aware that some rules around this are being written into law. Again, there are tools that will ﬂag any accessibility issues with your website. Try www.wave.webaim.org.

Branding
London-based customer experience agency Pomegranate thinks branding should play a key role in the make-up of your site. They told us: “Expressing what your brand stands for through design creates an emotional connection with customers.” Messaging around what rewards customers can expect will build an anticipation toward what they will experience during their stay, they added.
Your website’s performance will depend on a whole host of factors outside of this list, such as the hotel itself and prices, but putting strong foundations like these in place is critical. As the saying goes, ﬁrst impressions count.

Testing
If you’re planning to upgrade or add to your website over time, you’ll need to test these any new features in the same way that you tested the whole site when you built it. The likes of Booking.com are constantly testing things and the data they collect is part of the reason they perform so strongly online. They have a heavy budget dedicated to that, but as Neil Gardiner says “any testing is better than no testing” so even small-scale market research like a focus group can be meaningful. You can also use Google Analytics to see where visitors are spending most of their time or where there is very little activity.

In conclusion
It’s clear from the industry and from web design experts that nailing online customer experience will be a forever evolving task. There is no denying, however, that today hospitality begins online. We hope the advice in this report will help your website match up to the high standards of your lobby.