Hotel Website Design — Ston Easton Park Case Study

A bespoke website with direct booking for one of the most luxurious four red star country house hotels in Somerset.

Hotel web design for Ston Easton Country House Hotel

Ston Easton is one of the most luxurious four red star country house hotels in Somerset, with an award-winning restaurant and a listing in the book 1000 Places To See Before You Die. Mediatopia also designed the website for their sister property.

Having worked on various other projects with the management of Ston Easton Park Hotels, the brief was to create a beautiful hotel web design with a content management system behind it. We built a bespoke experience offering direct bookings, with the features and functions a four-star property needs to compete in today’s online marketplace.

That last point is the whole game for an independent hotel. Every booking taken through the website is a booking that has not paid commission to an online travel agent, and over a season the difference between a site that converts and one that does not is measured in tens of thousands of pounds.

How to design a hotel website

Modern guests have no time to lose. When you are creating a marketing plan to generate booking leads through a website, time is of the essence — and by that we mean time spent by your potential guests browsing your site. Your website has to be as productive and effective as possible, or visitors will click back and keep searching.

One of the fundamental considerations relates to technical issues: web hosting and the actual coding of the site. These are the two most important underlying factors in whether a hotel website is fast and useful. You want a site that loads extremely fast and meets your visitors’ expectations for convenience in browsing and efficiency in booking.

Technical implementation aside, there is another crucial factor tied to usability and design. Visitors must be able to navigate effortlessly and find what they are looking for. Once you have their attention, make sure the route to booking is always one click away — and when they do proceed, make sure there are no difficulties or delays.

In short, the site must be genuinely mobile-friendly, easy to use and fast to book from. An integrated booking system is vital: it keeps potential guests within your own property rather than sending them elsewhere at the moment they have decided to buy.

Online travel agents, SEO and repeat guests

Online travel agents are both an important ally and a persistent rival. You want to be listed on as many third-party sites as possible to expand your reach, while compelling guests to book directly so you save on commission. Get that balance right and you have the best of both.

Search engine optimisation is how you get found in the first place. Internally, that means a clearly structured site with a separate page for each room, offering as much information as possible as succinctly as possible using text, photographs and video. Search engines give more authority to sites that keep visitors engaged.

Externally, find creative ways to get other websites to mention your hotel and link to it. Every link is an authority point; a mention in a leading travel blog is worth a great deal more than a directory listing.

A loyalty scheme is another tool worth considering. Every large hotel group uses one, because it is a simple way to build a list of regular guests and bring them back with incentives and promotions — special rates available only through your own site, exclusive offers to previous guests through your newsletter.

Need a website like this?

Tell me what you need and I will give you a fixed price. You deal with the person who builds it — not an account manager, not an offshore team.