Hotel Website Design
We are sure you have heard of the term mobile-friendly website before, however, but do you know why it is so important to make sure your hotel’s website is also optimised for mobile users when it already looks so great on desktop? Well, unsurprisingly, the younger generation of travellers is increasingly choosing to use smartphones when it comes to doing research or booking their stays. And the statistics are here to back up this claim of mobile-leaning user behaviour:
The importance of catering to smartphone users and their needs becomes quite clear after just a quick glance at the statistics. And unfortunately, the hotels that don’t have a quality mobile-friendly website, which offers a great user experience and a seamless booking system will be missing out on a lot of potential guests. Such is because those travellers who are booking via a mobile device will simply look for a hotel that offers an easy way to book through mobile.
The main difference between desktop and mobile users is that the latter are much less likely to read large amounts of text. It’s also important to consider that the smaller screen (compared to the desktops), often makes large amounts of text look crammed, disorganised and hard to follow on smartphones, thus creating a poor user experience. To avoid this, your luxury hotel’s mobile-friendly website should highlight the most important information, so smartphone users can access everything they may need quickly and easily. Your main focus points on a mobile website should be your booking system, location and ways to contact your team.
By optimising and organising the information to better suit mobile device users you get to combine both SEO and great user experience, making the website discoverable to guests who are doing their research, while providing an easy way to book their stay on mobile.
When it comes to user experience, slow loading times can be a very frustrating issue to deal with, especially when trying to book a hotel stay. This issue is also not only limited to mobile devices and is also a desired part of the desktop user experience. One common factor that slows down websites is poorly optimised imagery. When you think about it, every image you upload onto a web page can slow down the loading times and provide a poor user experience. To avoid that, make sure you prioritise using WebP image format and compress the images you upload, which can be done with tools such as TinyPNG. It’s worth remembering that the optimal file size for a website image is no more than 200 KB.
As highlighted previously, a mobile-friendly website should make it quick and easy for potential guests to contact your team, without them having to leave the website and do extensive research to find your location and contact details. Elements such as a phone or email button, as well as Google Maps integration offer easy ways for mobile users to get important details about your luxury hotel without leaving the website. And if they can’t find certain information, they are provided with a quick and easy way to contact your team to get the answers they are looking for.
For most hoteliers, the implementation of a responsive website (which takes the content of the ‘main’ website and repurposes it to display in a clean layout on mobile devices), helps drive bookings from travellers looking for somewhere to stay, especially when it comes to more spontaneous bookings.
Take a look at these examples of responsive websites created by Big Bear for a luxury hospitality client – you can visit The Fellows House, The Folio Bar & Kitchen, and The Sage of Cambridge.
Knowing where to get started when creating a mobile-friendly website can be hard work if you don’t have the time, skills, or resources to do so. Contact the team at Big Bear and find out how we can take your hotel’s online presence to the next level.
Aside from well-optimised content and organised information, a responsive mobile-friendly website also needs to have a well-designed user interface, which will help prevent users from getting frustrated and leaving for the competitors’ websites. A layout specifically designed for mobile devices will help avoid such problems as clicking the wrong link because the buttons are too close together. Often, issues like this can drive potential visitors away to look for luxury stays with your competitors. Meanwhile, a good mobile website spaces out links, text, buttons and images efficiently, despite the small screen real estate, to make it easy for the customer to navigate around the website.
In conclusion, the importance of mobile-friendly user experience on luxury hotel websites becomes more and more important each year. With younger generations of travellers choosing mobile devices as their go-to, when booking and researching luxury stays. Making it crucial to start making steps towards making your website easier and quicker to use on mobile by ensuring fast loading speeds, optimised content and seamless booking system.
