Hotel website design: Full guide with best examples

What is hotel website design?

Hotel website design is the practice of designing a website for your accommodation business that is functional, aesthetically pleasing, and optimised for conversion.

Hotel websites have the very specific purpose of attracting visits from travellers, keeping them engaged, and enticing them to make a booking. This means the design of a hotel website needs to be tailored for these goals and should be undertaken by a specialised hotel website builder or designer.

In this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know about hotel website design including why it’s so important, what the best examples look like, and how to implement it successfully for your property.

How important is hotel web design for your property?

Hotel web design is extremely important for small properties who want to boost direct bookings and profit. A good hotel website that increases reservations delivers less reliance on online travel agencies (OTAs) – which charge commission fees on every booking.

Recent data shows that a hotel’s website was a more important source of revenue in 2022 than it was in 2019, indicating that direct bookings must be treated as a priority by all accommodation providers.

Your hotel web design is not just crucial for creating a place for travellers to book, it also contributes to:

• Capturing additional online traffic
• Helping to establish and enhance your brand reputation
• Exciting and inspiring travellers
• Building trust with consumers
• Providing resources for your customers

Given that more than 80% of people would now like to book travel online, creating a strong online presence via your website is vital.

Hotel website design examples

There are a few key factors that separate the best hotel website design from the mediocre. 

Before we go through the whole list, let’s take a look at a couple of the best hotel website design examples.

Using Little Hotelier’s website builder, Westmoreland Luxury Villa has been able to create a simple, attractive, and effective website.

You’ll see that the homepage provides a clear snapshot of everything a traveller needs to know. There are easy to navigate menus, a quick property summary, stunning imagery, contact details, and a clear call-to-action (CTA) to make a booking. This is all without needing to scroll further down the page or search around.

The traveller will feel comfortable exploring the website. They know it’s easy to use, provides useful resources, and makes it easy to book from any page or location.

If they do scroll, they can quickly see more information about the rooms on offer, more about the property’s story, and a full image gallery.

The same hotel website design templates that work for small hotels can also work just as well for larger properties:

By using a hotel website design tool that is specific for accommodation businesses, you can easily play to your property’s strengths. In this case, Erakor Island Resort and Spa has created an inspiring page dedicated to their wedding services. However, you’ll notice all the other important information that a traveller needs is just a click away.

Taking note of the best hotel website examples is an easy first step in creating your own successful website. It allows you to find properties that have a similar profile to yours and see what they are doing well, and also where you think you could make improvements.

Finding examples that you like is also a good way of finding a resource to help you build your hotel website. For instance, if you like the templates above then Little Hotelier is the tool for you.

Best hotel website design: What does it look like?

A lot of hotel website design is what travellers see on the page – but there’s also a lot going on in the background. This includes how the content is structured and created.

Let’s look at five of the best elements of hotel website design that make a website perform and function perfectly.

1. Search engine optimisation (SEO)

First and foremost, you need travellers to be able to find your website online. 

Sometimes this can be achieved by the ‘billboard effect’ where you link your website from your OTA profile. But you also need to appear in search engine results when travellers use Google or other metasearch sites to research hotels.

Improve SEO by creating content such as blogs and FAQs, having unique page titles and descriptions, making sure images and pages are optimised for fast load times, and that your website is functional on mobile devices.

2. Responsive and beautiful design

It’s important that your website looks amazing, which means using high resolution images. But it’s just as important that it loads quickly and is responsive on all devices.

With mobile now such a popular way to research and book travel, you can’t afford to have a website that doesn’t effectively support this.

Beautiful design also means making it clear and simple for users to navigate the site. This will ensure they don’t become bored, confused, or overwhelmed. Any friction they encounter is likely to cause them to abandon their booking.

3. Clear calls-to-action

You want every visitor to your website to take action. Your first priority is for them to book a stay, and this should be what you make easiest to achieve.

Giving potential guests the option to check availability and ensuring a ‘Book Now’ button is always visible is hotel website design 101. 

Other CTAs that are important to include are the option to contact your hotel directly, check your special offers and promotions, or view your packages.

4. Globally accessible

Guests aren’t just coming from your own backyard. You need to have your website setup to handle multiple languages and currencies too.

This will make it much easier for international guests to understand your offers. It will also make it more likely for them to confirm their booking.

5. Booking engine integration

Direct bookings online from your website or social media pages will be impossible without a hotel booking engine.

In most cases your website and booking engine provider will be the same, so integrating the two will be seamless and managing them together will be simple.

How to implement website design at your accommodation

No matter what your property type, good hotel website design is essential. The positive news is that there are easy ways to implement a web design solution at your property that suits your goals.

For example, Little Hotelier’s website builder has been designed specifically with small accommodation businesses in mind. It ensures that you can get set up quickly and hit the ground running.

It’s perfect for any type of small property including motels, guesthouses, and hostels but here are three top examples:

1. Boutique hotel website design

When choosing a theme for your website design, it’s important that it suits your brand and the content you want to display. Travellers have certain expectations around the high quality and personalisation of boutique hotels so your website design has to speak to these.

Use Little Hotelier to show off your boutique hotel’s best features by creating an amenities page and showcasing the things that make your brand unique with custom pages that you can easily make yourself. You can also edit them just as quickly and easily, ensuring travellers always see the latest services your boutique hotel has to offer.

2. Luxury hotel website design

Luxury guests want to see that they’re getting value for their money, so it’s paramount that you’re able to give them insight into the kind of luxury you can offer. Images are particularly important for engaging the imagination of luxury guests, but they love to know details too so your website design needs to strike a balance.

Use Little Hotelier to create stunning image galleries and advertise packages that will pamper your guests.

3. Bed and breakfast website design

Guests at a bed and breakfast are expecting their hosts to be locals who are ingrained in the community and can provide expert knowledge. It’s also important to them that they are coming to stay at a property that feels like a home away from home. Your B&B website design should focus on communicating warmth and cosy vibes.

Give weight to this promise by using Little Hotelier to create blog pages on your website that hand out tips or provide guides for first-time visitors to the area.

Hotel website design cost: Should you use a hotel website design agency?

While there are certainly plenty of website design agencies within the market, many are not hotel specific. It’s difficult to find website design professionals who understand the unique needs of a small hotel. The other risk of working with an agency is that they can sometimes take on too much work at once, meaning your work may be slow to deliver and there could be delays when you want updates or changes made.

As for the cost, a custom website build is going to cost you hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars and that will go up every time you need something changed.

It’s much safer to go with a dedicated hotel website design software provider, which only deals with hoteliers and knows your requirements ahead of time. In some cases, the technology is set up so that you can basically create your own website within minutes and update it as you like.

With Little Hotelier, you can get setup and running within 48 hours with a brand new website that wins you direct bookings.

Click here to get started completely free.

Best examples of hotel website design companies

While there are plenty of potential hotel website design vendors on the market, there are two that you shouldn’t overlook.

Little Hotelier

Little Hotelier has a long and successful history of delivering success to small hotels and accommodation providers. With more than a decade of experience, Little Hotelier knows exactly what small businesses need to succeed.

As mentioned, one of the features of Little Hotelier’s all-in-one solution is its hotel website builder. This feature allows you to build your own website in minutes, and there’s no setup or hosting fees. You can also edit and customise your website as much as you like, for no extra charge.

The best bit? Start for free and cancel anytime with no lock-in contract.

SiteMinder

Established in 2006, SiteMinder is the hotel industry’s leading technology provider. At the most recent HotelTechAwards, SiteMinder was awarded #1 Hotel Commerce Platform, #1 Channel Manager, #1 Booking Engine, and #3 Website Builder.

SiteMinder has a proud tradition of delivering big results for independent hoteliers looking to grow their hotel business and make life easier at the same time.

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Let Little Hotelier be your hotel website design inspiration

Not only are the hotel website design examples you’ve seen in this article inspiring, but they’re also simple.

Little Hotelier’s website builder was created to make life easier for small accommodation businesses like yours. 
There are six key advantages you’ll see straight away by choosing to create your new hotel website design with Little Hotelier:

• No web development required – You can do it all yourself thanks to a simple template and customisable themes.
• Modern, responsive designs – Your website will work seamlessly across any device a traveller chooses to browse with.
• Uniquely yours – Your brand logo, colours, domain, and other branding will all be effortlessly incorporated into your design.
• Visible online – All the hard work on SEO has already been done, so you just need to add your content.
• Ready for global bookings – Your chosen website template will already be optimised for multiple languages and currencies.
• Hit the ground running – All you need is your words and images ready to go, and we’ll get you started straight away.

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