Hotel website: what to check before rebuilding

Start with questions guests ask before booking

Collect the questions your team receives most often and compare them with the website. Is information about rooms, services, arrival, conditions and location easy to find? Is it current? Who is responsible for checking it when something changes?

Every answer does not need to appear on every page. A dedicated page can explain a subject and receive links from the points where that question arises. A special request needs a route to someone who can respond, without becoming an automatic promise.

Check the pages people arrive on

The homepage is not necessarily the first page a visitor sees. Search may lead to a room, a service, a guide or a page about a particular need.

Each entry point should explain where the visitor is, what they can understand there and what they can do next. Prioritising pages requires available evidence: searches, landing pages, markets and devices. Without that data, you can propose a hypothesis, but you cannot attribute unmeasured lost bookings to a particular page.

Keep availability and prices in their source system

The booking engine or other responsible system remains the source of the actual booking conditions. The website should support the handover without maintaining a second availability record that could become inconsistent.

Check that the right property, language and entered information reach the intended destination. Include awkward cases: unavailable dates, an interrupted search or a service error. A click on “book” does not show that a stay has been confirmed.

Try a real task on a phone

Choose a genuine question, such as finding available room types or reading arrival conditions, and follow the path on a small screen. Try the menu, controls, forms and page transitions. Observe what remains difficult to reach or understand.

For example, a family might want to arrive late and request a cot. Standard information can be read on the site; a particular need should reach the team that can decide. This is an illustrative scenario, not a guaranteed capability for every property or a client case study.

Separate the enquiry, notification and reply

If the site collects enquiries, define who receives them, where they are stored and how work resumes after an error. An acknowledgement should correspond to an actual acquisition by the system. A notification and a staff reply are later steps.

This distinction makes it possible to verify the process without relying only on the message displayed in the browser. Prepare tests with an agreed environment or recipient, avoiding unnecessary guest data.

Decide how to assess the work beforehand

Visits, booking engine opens, acquired enquiries and confirmed bookings measure different things. Choose which outcomes matter and which sources can demonstrate them. Compare consistent periods and markets, noting campaigns, seasonality and events.

A technical correction can be checked directly on the affected journey. A change in visits requires subsequent data and does not automatically establish a causal effect. Defining these boundaries before the work makes the final review more useful.

The next step

Prepare the current website, your team’s questions, the systems involved and any available aggregated data. These provide a basis for a scope with identifiable pages, connections and acceptance checks.

Read about websites and journeys for hospitality and the web design service. To describe your property’s situation, you can define the project. The site’s configurator requires human verification before the questions.