Hotel Website Design & User Experience (UX) Trends for 2023

We are increasingly living in a digital, on-demand world. As a result, the interrelated domains of web design and user experience (UX) are constantly expanding and growing – and 2023 is set to be another year of significant change. Travel experience demand is only increasing this year, so your guests’ requirement for a quick, simple, tailored website experience is also growing. With the reality of severe competition and the ongoing rise of digital commerce, your hotel’s website faces (unfortunately) a binary choice: keep up or be left behind.

In this article, you’ll find emerging website design and UX trends that hotels should be aware of in 2023.

First Impressions are Essential, and so is Easy Navigation!

Many hoteliers believe that their property’s landing page or “home page” (i.e., the initial content displayed when a visitor navigates to the website) is only a throwaway, a place to post a few images and a brief introduction to the hotel. In actuality, this may be a visitor’s first interaction with you. And first impressions are essential! Don’t think of your property’s home page as a book cover.

Insight:
Current trends indicate that users expect it to be more like a table of contents. You want guests to be able to find links to the content they need immediately — whether that’s room types, amenities, an image gallery, or a booking link.

An Engine for Revenue

Speaking of the booking link, it should be prominent. It’s important to remember that a hospitality website serves as your hotel’s core revenue generation engine. An optimized online presence is a powerful storefront and converts the hotel website into its most important sales channel.

Since many guests hope to decide where to stay quickly, they may want to skip to the end of their experience not long after starting. So having a “Book Now” or “Check Availability” link displayed right up top serves as a convenient call to action — and, of course, that’s the action you want them to take.

Worth noting:
Some hotels have found engaging in A/B testing of open booking consoles vs. closed variants beneficial. The results can depend heavily on the type of property you’re working with, but running this experiment can prove which style your guests prefer.

Incorporate Your Hotel’s USPs

Let’s face it: if your hotel is located in a destination people want to travel to, chances are you’re constantly competing for bookings. This means your hotel’s website needs to distinguish your property from others in the area by offering something unique. While it’s tempting to assume a guest will always opt for the lowest price, that doesn’t necessarily end up being the case. Because of this, your property’s online presence also needs to prominently offer what’s often referred to as a “unique selling proposition” (or “USP”).

That means letting prospective guests know what sets your property apart, indicating what they can look forward to when they arrive. This can take several forms, including:

Location

Is your hotel close to area points of interest? If guests can quickly get to spots that may be why they came to your city (e.g., convention centers, airports, local attractions, etc.), they’ll want to know that.

Amenities

What value-adds does your property offer? On-site dining, recreation, shuttle service, pet-friendliness, on-site pools or fitness centers — guests looking for more than a standard stay will appreciate information on the extras up-front.

Intriguing Features

Many hotels are leaning into perks and quirks, like “lending libraries” filled with fun travel gear, sharing stations with area food and drink specialties, themed rooms, or unique décor reflecting local art and culture.

Historic Interest

Does your property have a fascinating past? Maybe it’s a converted industrial building, former artists’ enclave, or once hosted a prominent historical event. Guests enjoy the chance to feel like a part of something bigger.

Guest Comforts

Still, other visitors are looking for the plushest experience possible. If your hotel is a prestige property, don’t be afraid to lean into luxury. Guests more concerned with comfort and service than costs will appreciate it. Regardless of what makes your hotel distinct from others, it’s a certainty that whatever it is will appeal to the guests you most want to attract.

Build Trust with Your Brand

Since your website is most likely the first and most frequent avenue through which prospective guests will interact with your property (at least until check-in), Fostering peace of mind ahead of time is crucial. If guests don’t feel secure or appreciated, they’ll look elsewhere.

Does your property offer secure parking or key-restricted lobby access? That’s worth mentioning on your website for the security conscious. Do you provide flexible rescheduling or cancellations? It’s important to highlight this so guests can book with confidence. Even employing soft language in the copy and calming color theory in the branding palette helps guests to feel good about selecting you.

Remember:
Despite any available extras, the hotel’s primary products are comfort, rest, and safety. So the more guests understand that your hotel is their best choice to satisfy these conditions, the more likely they are to book.

Prioritizing Personalization

Another way to build trust is via personalization — which is shaping up to be one of the most prominent emerging trends for the future of hospitality. Guests always feel valued when they understand they’re more than just a booking. Permitting guests to customize certain aspects of their stay via your website affords a level of warmth that will be remembered (which means thinking beyond extra pillows or turn-down service).

Many properties are now building portals allowing guests to “tweak” aspects of their stay to their liking during or after the reservation. By offering features like custom toiletry menus, preferred types of snacks or beverages in the minibar, baby or child extras (e.g., cribs, changing tables, or activity books), or even tickets to local attractions offered as part of a premium package, your hotel can extend a level of welcome any guest will appreciate.

Engage at the Point of Inspiration

Overall, offering the information your guests are looking for is all in service of a clear goal. Specifically: to earn their business. So affording guests simple and direct ways to view the spaces you have available, and making booking decisions is key.

Several ways to do this align with what guests have come to expect and with emerging design/navigation trends. Among them:

Option Comparison

Highlighting differences in aspects like square footage, number and type of beds, view, and in-room features, guests can choose what’s most important to them. A simple icon set can offer this info at a glance.

Clear Pricing

Although cost often isn’t guests’ first concern, it typically factors in. So transparent pricing is helpful. It’s also beneficial to include any applicable fees or taxes. No guest likes surprise hidden charges at the last moment.

Clean Imagery

Being able to get a sneak peek of a given space both adds value and builds anticipation. So employing explicit and current optimized imagery of available rooms is something guests will appreciate when it comes to planning. Suppose your property has the budget and digital bandwidth. In that case, video snippets are also increasingly being built into many websites to offer guests sweeping “virtual tours” of your hotel’s high points — further inspiring engagement.

Sharing Options

This aspect of the booking process is often overlooked, but it shouldn’t be. Offering guests a way to resume a search that was started in one place but may pick up in another is an appreciated convenience. Guests may also want to share their search with friends, co-workers, or family. So making sharing an easy feature is a highly recommended practice.

Finding Favorites

Additionally, permitting guests to click an icon that designates a “favorites” functionality (which allows their preferred accommodations and/ or features to be easily earmarked for future reference) means they’ll be able to pick up where they left off any time prior easily to make a final booking decision.

Simplify & Summarize

Booking a stay at your hotel should be an immediate and straightforward prospect for guests. Still, since selecting is often a multi-step process, it’s essential to offer a summary of the guest’s experience before asking them to confirm the booking. That way, if they make any mistakes during the selection process, they can correct them before locking in their choices. This works toward further trust-building and saves potential hassles on the hotel’s end that could arise from guests needing to make changes after the fact.

That means concisely reiterating information like:

• The dates of the stay
• Type and size of room booked
• Payment method used
• Total of charges and when they’ll occur (e.g., immediately or at check-in)
• Reference number

Overall, thinking like a guest for this part of the process is essential. Offering a rundown of their choices and what they agree to before closing the transaction helps avoid issues and confusion later.

Mobile still Matters

Although hardly a new trend per se, cross-platform considerations remain key. When crafting your online presence, thinking only of how your content appears on large screens is an understandable pitfall. However, current digital traffic statistics overwhelmingly indicate prospective guests are far more likely to discover and engage with you using mobile devices.

So it’s incumbent upon hoteliers to ensure that websites are just as fast to load and as easy to navigate and interact within a palm-sized format as they are from a desk. If your site takes too long to load or has clunky navigation on mobile? Guests will look elsewhere, and you’ve potentially lost a booking.

Final Thoughts

Ease of experience and personalization has emerged as the most crucial components of any online interaction in 2023 — especially as it pertains to transactional traffic. Because of this, it should be a top priority of any hospitality entity to ensure prospective guests can enjoy a hassle-free undertaking when navigating an online presence.

Admittedly, there are a lot of moving parts to consider when it comes to streamlining a given guest’s interactions with your website. That’s why it’s so essential to align with a partner that intrinsically understands what it takes to craft an end-to-end effective online presence.

Free Guide: 5 Data-driven Strategies for Optimizing Your Hotel Revenue