Hotel Website Design

What it can look like for hotels

This Velara Hotel demo was built by us as an example of the design, not a fully operational hotel website. It contains a cinematic-style main page plus an exploration mode that takes visitors through scenes of deluxe, executive, and suite rooms, a pool, a restaurant, a spa, to a ballroom, with each scene directly linkable so that one room type can be shared as a single link. A design of this scale falls under the Business package and only makes sense if you already have the photos or videos.

What you get

For hotels, the content prospective guests check most usually includes:

• Each room type with its size in square meters, bed type and size, number of guests, window view, and what's in the room
• Honest photos of each room type, including the bathroom, updated after every renovation
• Hotel facilities with each one's opening hours, because a pool that closes at six in the evening is something people look for before booking
• Meeting and event spaces with capacity per layout, available equipment, and who to contact for a quote
• Complete stay policies: check-in and check-out times, children under a certain age, pets, extra guests, and cancellation
• Location with the distance to the airport, the station, and the places that bring people to the city
• How to book directly with you, along with what you actually offer for direct bookings
• Links to the booking channels you already use, so guests who are more comfortable there don't get lost looking for them

What we don't recommend at the start: writing room rates as fixed figures on the page. Hotel rates move daily with the season, the day of the week, and occupancy, so a figure posted today will be wrong in two weeks, and guests who read it will bring that figure to the front desk. There's a second reason people notice less often: your agreement with a booking app may include terms about prices on other channels, so read the contract before posting a lower rate on your own website. Write a starting price with a note that rates change by date, then point to the booking options.

Pricing for a hotel website

Hotels rarely fit on a single page, so the Business package, Rp 5.000.000 with a processing time of 1 to 2 weeks, is usually the most suitable. Each room type needs its own page or section with several photos, in addition to facilities, event spaces, and accommodation terms. In this package, photos are stored on Cloudflare's CDN, so the room gallery remains quickly accessible on guests' mobile phones while they're traveling, and there's a blog to write about things that tourists look for before choosing a hotel, such as how to get to the nearest tourist attractions from your city.

The Starter package, Rp 1.500.000 with a processing time of around 3 days, is still suitable for small inns, homestays, or guest houses with two to three room types. A comparison of the contents can be found on the package page.

When direct booking through the website is worth pursuing, calculated from the commission of booking applications in your own report, we discuss it together by analyzing the Velara demo in the article example of a small hotel website.

Questions we often get from hotels

If guests still book through apps, won't our website be a loss?

The booking application charges a commission for every night sold, continuously as long as you use it, while a website is paid for once. Even for guests who ultimately still book through the application, your page is often where the decision is made, because that's where they confirm the hotel is real and the room is suitable. Some guests also actually look for the hotel's phone number to ask about things that are not on the application, and they enter through the website.

Can we write a cheaper price for direct bookings?

Check your agreement with each booking application first, because many of them contain price parity provisions and violating them will affect your position in their search results. A safer approach is to offer something that is not a tariff discount: breakfast for two people, airport pickup, later checkout, or a welcome drink. The value is felt by the guests, and the tariffs that appear remain the same on all channels.

We want our own booking system on the website. Is it possible?

Yes, but that's a different job. The booking system must be connected to your hotel's channel manager or system so that room availability is the same everywhere, plus a connection to the payment provider. Rooms sold twice due to unsynchronized availability are problems that your receptionist has to solve in the middle of the night. Before that, direct guests to the channels you already use and provide WhatsApp for special requests.

Our photos are from a three-year-old shoot and some of the rooms have been renovated.

Replace the photos of the rooms that have changed, and do not mix old photos with new ones in the same room type. Guests compare the photos with the room they enter, and the difference becomes a review material. If the budget for re-shooting is not available yet, cell phone photos taken in the daytime with the curtains open and the room in a guest-ready condition are sufficient, as long as they are taken from the entrance so that the room's width can be seen honestly.

We already have many negative reviews on the app. Can the website help?

The website does not delete reviews, but can respond to repeated objections in them. If many guests complain about narrow parking, write openly how many cars can fit and where the alternative parking is. If the complaint is about a room without windows, mention which type is like that and give it a different price. Guests who choose with complete information rarely write bad reviews about things they already knew before arriving.