Best Hotel Website Design: 11 Hotels with Exceptional Websites
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Comments: Thanks to website builders and business website templates, creating an online presence for your hotel is easier than ever. But designing it to convey your hotel’s specific look and feel? To exude luxury, emanate affordability, or channel a crisp, understated elegance? That’s a little trickier.
To make it easier, then, we’ve collated our favorite 11 hotel website examples from across the internet. These sites represent the best hotel website design we’ve found, and – between parallax scrolling, intuitive layouts, and immersive multimedia – should offer all the inspiration you need to start your own hotel business website.
Let’s dig in!
Key Trends in Hotel Website Design
Before we launch into our list of 11 hotels with stunning websites, let’s quickly unpack four of this year’s central trends in hotel web design:
- Responsive design for various devices: with smartphone and tablet-based browsing now the norm, responsive, mobile-first design is vital. Responsive websites adjust their layout and content to fit different screen sizes and resolutions, ensuring a seamless visual experience for users – no matter where they’re browsing from.
- User-centric design principles: user-centric design focuses on creating hotel websites that are easy to navigate, intuitive to use, and provide relevant information as effectively and expeditiously as possible. Some examples? Well-organized menus, clearly separated content sections, and a logical site layout.
- Integration of immersive multimedia elements: these include high-quality images and videos – such as virtual tours – that help showcase a hotel’s buildings, amenities, and local attractions. Some hotels are even using effects such as parallax scrolling, or VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality) to elicit an interactive, immersive feel.
- Emphasis on storytelling and brand identity: this involves conveying a hotel’s unique experiences, atmosphere, and history through a combination of visuals, copy, and design elements. You can also integrate your hotel social media on your website. Done well, storytelling helps create an emotional connection with visitors, and can positively influence their decision to book a stay there.
1. Burj Al Arab Jumeirah
The website of Burj Al Arab Jumeirah, a Dubai-based hotel, exudes luxury.
From the moment you land on the homepage, a full-width video – which includes sweeping panoramic drone shots of the hotel, combined with lifestyle footage of gorgeous people enjoying the facilities – plays, immersing potential guests in the experience they can expect.
Scroll down, and Burj Al Arab Jumeirah’s website cleanly and neatly advertises its different rooms and packages with stylish carousel features: allowing users to quickly compare and contrast the hotel’s offerings. Throughout the website, Burj Al Arab uses full-width images of the hotel to capture its essence, with compelling CTAs inviting users to discover the hotel’s packages for meetings, weddings, and other events.
Burj Al Arab Jumeirah
Click the image below to expand 2. Casa Angelina
Amalfi Coast-based hotel Casa Angelina’s website utilizes parallax scrolling effects to elicit an immersive, imaginative experience that drops you right into the hotel’s small slice of paradise.
As you scroll, elements enlarge and contract; popping up and shrinking away in time with your cursor. It’s a striking set of visual effects – but Casa Angelina’s website is no one-trick pony. Its copy is beautifully written, and expertly captures the essence of the hotel and its location:
“Sitting atop the curvaceous cliffs of Italy’s Amalfi Coast, Casa Angelina offers a sublime slice of modern minimalism on the Mediterranean, with an emphasis on barefoot luxury and top-level gastronomy.”
Not bad, huh? We’ll see you there!
Casa Angelina
Click the image below to expand 3. Austin Motel
If it’s possible for a hotel website to channel the quirky aesthetic language of a Wes Anderson film, Austin Motel comes closest.
Bold – yet elegant – red typography and CTA buttons compliment large photos of Austin Motel’s interior (we particularly love that wallpaper), while the copy is full of puns and wordplay that winks, self-referentially, at the audience. One example? Austin Motel’s email newsletter signup section, which says “we want to check in with you”. Check in…geddit?
Find Out More: If you want to learn about the different Types of Hotel Newsletter you can run on your own hotel site, check out our full guide!
Austin Motel
Click the image below to expand 4. Little Palm Island
Located on an island of white-sand beaches off the coast of Florida, Little Palm Island is a spot “created”, as its copy proclaims, “for presidents, celebrities, and you”.
But Little Palm Island’s hotel website doesn’t simply tell us how luxurious it is – it shows us, too. An autoplay video (not everyone’s bag, but we think it works here) kicks off as soon as you land on the website’s homepage and instantly gives you an immersive and indulgent introduction to life at Little Palm.
And, if the images, videos, and enticing copy aren’t enough to convince you, the testimonials will. Knowing the power of social proof, Little Palm Island prominently features positive testimonials from former guests.
Little Palm Island
Click the image below to expand 5. Refinery Hotel
Located in New York City, Refinery Hotel is a sleek, sexy, and uber-cool place to stay – so it’s no surprise that its website has all these attributes in spades.
Set against a monochromatic moving background and utilizing font reminiscent of old typewriter style, Refinery Hotel draws on the look and feel of New York’s Roaring Twenties, eliciting a vibe of prohibition, gangsters, and post-war prosperity.
Refinery Hotel’s website blends overlaid images of the hotel with blown-up reviews from guest testimonials to build trust. There are also quick links to Refinery Hotel’s blog – Refinery Times – which features interviews with prominent or especially interesting guests.
Refinery Hotel
Click the image below to expand 6. Hotel Provincial
Based in Ballarat – an Australian city reachable in just over an hour, by train, from Melbourne, Australia – Hotel Provincial offers a place to stay that’s “just like staying at your exceptionally stylish best friend’s house”.
It’s a bold claim: but based on its website, at least, it’s one Hotel Provincial backs up with gusto. Channeling plenty of white space – contrasted with the hotel’s iconic shade of navy blue – the website has a crisp, clean feel that’s easy on the eye and a refreshing balm for the soul. Strong, prominent headlines and a mix of portrait and landscape images of varying sizes imbue the site with a visual flair and elegance – and we absolutely love those circular “Book Now” CTAs.
Hotel Provincial
Click the image below to expand 7. Nobnocket Boutique Inn
Nobnocket Boutique Inn – a bespoke bed ‘n’ breakfast in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts – is accommodation that attempts to strike a delicate balance between luxury and down-to-earth. And, thanks to its website, it succeeds.
Like Hotel Provincial, Nobnocket’s hotel website plays on the beautiful effect the pairing of blue and white produces, while its use of a grid display divides the page into bite-sized, manageable visual chunks for the reader. This makes Nobnockets’ site extremely easy to use: you can view its rooms, amenities, and services – as well as check availability – all in one scroll from the top of its homepage.
We also love Nobnocket’s website footer. Never the most glamorous portion of a website, Nobnocket’s is, at least, highly functional. It contains quick links to each key part of the site, plus – more importantly – a list of all the recent awards the inn has won (valuable social proof, remember).
Nobnocket Boutique Inn
Click the image below to expand 8. Prince Akatoki
Situated in London, Prince Akatoki is a hotel built around the minimalist design principles of Japan – and its website follows suit.
The website achieves that Spartan elegance through a stripped-back, subtle design language: synthesizing stark black font with white space and simple, stylized images of the hotel’s interior.
An embedded video allows users to take a closer look, while a pop-up is an effective way for Prince Akatoki to increase its email subscriber base – and for potential guests to access exclusive offers and discounts.
Prince Akatoki
Click the image below to expand 9. Hotel de la Poste
Based in Cortina d’Ampezzo, a small town ensconced in the heart of Italy’s Dolomites, is an equally captivating gem: Hotel de la Poste. And, in the same way that the Mediterranean mountain range tells a story as old as time itself, the hotel’s website is a similar adept weaver of a narrative.
“A family history, since 1804”, the website reads, before inviting the reader to explore its “bicentennial story” in a part of the site dedicated to the hotel’s history. This is a crucial part of any hotel website – connecting with readers and potential guests by sharing the journey of the building, its surroundings, and its people.
Of course, that’s not all Hotel de la Poste’s website does well. Its sepia-tinged street-view images, simple typography, and intuitive layout combine to create a vibe of humility and charm.
Take us there!
Hotel de la Poste
Click the image below to expand 10. Naumi Studio
Perched halfway up Wellington, New Zealand’s famous Cuba Street, Naumi Studio is a quirky, offbeat boutique hotel that dances to the beat of its own drum – as does its website.
With brazen, kaleidoscopic hues of hot pink – also the color of its CTA buttons – set against images of neon lighting and magenta couches, Naumi Hotel’s website serves up vivid, vivacious fare. Yet importantly, this aesthetic flair never compromises on functionality.
At the top of Naumi Studio’s website homepage, prospective guests will find everything they need to know: including address, phone number, map location, and a link to reserve a room. And, for those who’ve already reserved a room, it’s quick and easy to locate the reservation.
Naumi Studio
Click the image below to expand 11. Dryft Darocotan Island
Perhaps the most off-the-beaten-track of the hotel website examples we’ve profiled here is Dryft. Located on Darocotan Island – a remote island off the coast of Palawan, Philippines – Dryft offers high-end glamping experiences in bamboo-woven huts on the beach.
So, what makes its website so great? Well for starters, Dryft does what so many of the online presences with the best hotel website design do well – it keeps it simple. At the top of Dryft’s website, there’s a toolbar in which would-be guests can enter the dates of their stay to check availability (set against an embedded video, of course), while further down a carousel feature makes it easy to compare and contrast Dryft’s different room offerings.
Dryft also uses a grid layout to showcase the food and yoga guests can enjoy there, with bold, clear headings – set in white type on a black background – highlighting the menu’s “fresh”, “local”, and “sustainable” selling points.
Dryft Darocotan Island
Click the image below to expand Summary
In this list of the best hotel web design, we’ve taken you on a tour. From Wellington and Ballarat to Massachusetts, plus Austin and New York City; from the Amalfi Coast to the Dolomites, all the way to remote locations as disparate as Florida and the Philippines.
But, more importantly, we’ve taken you on another kind of tour. From grid-like image layouts to stunning full-width videos we’ve soared; between parallax scrolling and storytelling techniques we’ve sailed. All to help your hotel get to a destination much strived for, but all-too-rarely located – effective web design!
So let us know if we helped stoke the fires of your imagination in the comments section below. And, to read up on how to build a hotel website (or the process of designing websites more broadly), be sure to check out our guides to those exact topics, right here on Website Builder Guide.
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