An Ultimate Guide to Designing Hotel Websites in 2023

While getting ready for the post-pandemic rebound, the hotel industry made several efforts to fight back against the dominance of online travel agencies (OTAs). The efforts include investments in redesigning hotel websites, promoting direct bookings through various advertising and marketing campaigns, pay-per-click advertising, and search engine optimization. 

Hoteliers also worked toward offering the “best price” guarantees with exclusive direct booking and package deals on the hotel websites and making the booking process and payment system easier. Furthermore, hotels developed their social media presence and roped in influencers to drive more revenue via direct bookings.

These efforts by the hotel industry have surely paid off, and we expect steady growth in the following years. Several hospitality market research companies have also indicated that since 2021, direct distribution has positively affected long-term consumer behaviour, making hotel websites the most important channel for new guests and bookings. 

In our previous blog, we explored in detail how the hotel business has been adapting to the constantly changing landscape and what customers want in the new normal world. We also have had a comprehensive discussion about the increasing importance of having a powerful, visually impressive hotel website design with a successfully integrated mobile-optimized online booking engine to have a key advantage over third-party distribution.  

In today’s blog post, let’s explore and further learn how hotels can evolve as the ultimate trusted source of information for visitors, revive the direct business, gain guest loyalty, and build direct customer relationships by improving hotel websites in 2023. 

Emerging Hotel Web Design Trends for 2023

While we see a lot of developments in past trends such as dynamic scrolling, gender-neutral colour palettes, page speed, and simpler layouts, there is an immediate emphasis on making the user experience simplified and more engaging. Besides interactive widgets and bold typography, there are certain emerging hotel web design trends as below that look quite promising in terms of functionality.

1. Visual Storytelling

With fierce competition and the availability of a plethora of options, you need to create the perfect reasons your potential guests should choose your hotel over another property. 

Travellers today expect hotels to offer a human experience during their stay where they can create unforgettable memories while feeling safe and stress-free. They are more than ever interested in the story and values of your hotel and the way you communicate them. So, it is vital for hoteliers to tell their brand stories, highlighting the human aspect of the customer experience they have specially designed for their guests, using high-resolution photos and videos through the concept of visual storytelling. 

Visual storytelling has been a part of the industry’s marketing tool for a few years but now this technique has become critical to encourage direct bookings and increase sales through your hotel’s website. 

Capitalizing on the travellers’ constantly changing priorities after the pandemic, as a hotelier you must make additional efforts to connect with potential guests by putting all the relevant features and benefits you are offering front and centre. For example, give more emphasis on themes around cleanliness and sanitization as it has become imperative to publicize your hotel’s hygiene and safety standards to attract potential guests. Make sure to include demonstrating videos and managed content on your hotel’s enhanced cleanliness and safety measures along with the skills and dedication of your trained staff in your marketing imagery and videos on the website. 

Also, think about unique authentic stories you can craft around day-to-day activities as well in the hotel to connect and attract your potential guests. These stories can be themed around unique features you are offering for business and leisure travels, adventure tours, wellness packages, spiritual travels, food and beverage extravagance, economy travels, poolside experiences, family entertainment, digitized guest experiences, or customized guest interactions.

Besides, make it a point to collect feedback and reviews from your core customers, new guests, employees, and other business partners, and share their stories as part of your hotel’s visual storytelling. 

Note that, people don’t buy what you are offering. They buy why you are offering and how that makes them feel. It’s only when you effectively communicate the thought and dedication behind your services in an authentic, engaging way, keeping your customers first that people start to relate to your visual stories deeply and agree to engage with your business.

2. Accessibility

Diversity and inclusion are consistently coming into the limelight, and we expect these initiatives to influence hotel website design in 2023 and beyond. There is a growing focus on building accessible web design for hotels with an aim to serve all guests. It is to ensure that guests with physical and/or cognitive disabilities can easily navigate and interact with the website, including your online hotel booking engine. 

All users should be able to access and perceive the information presented, interpret and understand the content through assistive technologies and other evolving user agents. Incorporate keyboard and mouse navigation, closed captions and transcripts on videos, and image alt text for screen readers; provide sufficient contrast between text and background; choose readable font size, and ensure content is well organized. You should also confirm that your website content is compatible with user tools, both current and future, including assistive technologies and different browsers.

To better serve your guests, make sure to include information about your hotel property’s accessible services, amenities, and rooms throughout your website as appropriate. 

3. Mobile-first Design 

Google now favours and ranks mobile-friendly websites since most travellers check hotel websites on their mobile devices. So, it’s critically important to design and optimize hotel websites with a mobile-first approach. And this involves a lot more than just creating a responsive website. In fact, in 2023, this is going to be one of the primary concerns for web designers. Make sure to incorporate thumb-friendly navigation and buttons while having simple and prominent CTAs. 

4. Voice Search

As expected, this trend is here to stay with our increasing dependence on voice assistants, from Amazon Echo, and Google Home to Apple Siri. It is already a popular way many users navigate the web and also supports a website’s accessibility. You can integrate voice search within the hotel website with apps so that users can search for room availability using their voice. Besides, make sure that your content is voice searchable.

5. Chatbots

Chatbots found their way to the hotel web design trends list a couple of years back, and have been trending since. Relying on AI, chatbots provide immediate answers to customer queries, saving time for both guests and businesses. Furthermore, chatbots can help reduce call waiting times. For instance, your chatbot can support your hotel website’s personalization initiatives and make appropriate room as well as add-on recommendations to guests based on what they searched for on your hotel website. 

6. Virtual Reality

Having VR technology integrated into your hotel website is a fantastic way to enrich your hotel’s visual storytelling and boost direct bookings. Many reputed hotels have already employed VR and you may take some cues from them. Make a quick search for “VR hotel tours” on Google and you can check some fascinating examples for some serious inspiration. Users can simply check out the view and walk around your hotel property, including rooms, and have a one-of-a-kind virtual experience through this technology before making a reservation.

7. Personalization

This trend will become more essential with time. Personalization technology can help you create tailored services and offer perks suitable to specific customer needs. The personalized online booking process and predictive personalization that leverages AI and machine learning to display hotel rooms, deals, and offers automatically will greatly appeal to customers and make them respond positively. 

8. Cleaner Design

This past trend is getting traction in 2023 as it supports a calm and relaxing online experience. With the use of more white space that makes the images pop, consistent visual elements and fonts, and lesser text, a simpler and cleaner hotel web design is making navigation easier, where visitors can smoothly focus on the most important calls-to-action and convert to guests faster. 

9. Sustainability 

Gaining popularity over the years, sustainability has become one of the leading hotel web design trends for 2023. Reminding people of how our online activities have a negative impact on the environment in terms of carbon emissions, an added emphasis is being given to green web hosting. 

People today have become more environmentally aware, and if you opt for an eco-friendly way to power your website, you not only reduce your carbon footprint but also let your visitors know that you are a part of the green transformation. Also, a thoughtful and intuitive website design with clean coding, compressed images, useful content, usability, accessible navigation, proper optimization, and high performance that puts people as well as the planet first is another effective way to provide an impressive user experience.

In addition to telling your hotel’s visually stunning story and sharing brand promise, make sure to leverage modern design trends, technical SEO, CRO (conversion rate optimization), and social media management to turn visitors into guests.

The Takeaway

The hotel industry has undergone significant changes after the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite recession fears in 2023, the hospitality industry, however, looks strong. In this ever-changing landscape, hoteliers should thoroughly prepare to cultivate innovative responses and reinvent themselves to appeal to their potential guests. Hotels should continue to focus on developing and improving their efficiencies, prioritizing immersive customer experiences, automation, analytics, and bigger and better technology.

There is increasing importance for hotels to identify their unique value proposition and reach their targeted guest segment. And a strategically-built hotel website that addresses all the concerns expected over the coming years can be a total game changer!

Now that you know the emerging trends for hotel website design in 2023, we hope you will find this discussion helpful when planning a design refresh for your website. Always remember that in 2023 and beyond, your hotel website’s primary purpose is to drive direct sales. Here are some more observations you may consider highlighting on your website to engage your potential customers.

• Clearly state the benefits you are offering when guest books through your hotel’s website. For example, guarantee the best rates as well as special deals for your customers that they can avail of only when they book directly through the website instead of an OTA. 
• Inform and promote the advantages of becoming a loyal member to your potential customers to encourage direct bookings.
• Introduce perks for guests who travel with a companion to generate more interest to book direct through your website.
• Display a few recent guest reviews on the homepage of the website, and bring the best room deals listed first so that they are easily visible to the visitors and may interest them to book directly.
• Offer flexible online reservations so that guests can change or cancel a booking within a certain period of time in a hassle-free way when they book through your hotel’s website.
• Develop a local neighbourhood guide or give a list of activities and recommendations on the website that guests can find interesting to do in the vicinity of the hotel’s location or in the city.
• Provide a 360-degree image of the room, virtual tours, and detailed descriptions next to high-quality images of the room. Also, clearly state everything that is included in the price of the room.
• Make sure the booking system automatically suggests the closest dates available to the guest’s desired dates of booking in case certain dates are unavailable.

Based on the market findings, it is important that hotels invest in developing professional website design, hotel booking engines, and high-quality, dynamic, and rapidly-changing content that can deeply engage and convince travellers. You should also consider highlighting the benefits of direct booking such as guaranteed best price and complimentary breakfast on the website. Add multiple languages as well to attract international guests. 

Conclusion

Your hotel’s website should be optimized not only to drive leads but convert them into real revenue for your business. Great design and fast performance of your website are indicators to potential guests that they will have a unique experience with your brand, and these qualities will help you stand out. A successful hotel website should make all the popular queries of guests easily accessible; provide transparent, reliable, and authentic answers, and be the ultimate source of information for the guests. 

If you are not sure about what elements to prioritize on your hotel’s website or how to make your hotel web design future-proof, get in touch with our experienced web design team at Leidsens!