Hotel booking process design & usability

Travel UCD - consultants in travel and hospitality website design 
http://www.travelucd.com 

© Travel UCD Limited 2003. All Rights Reserved.

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Hotel booking process design & usability 
Travel UCD – February 2003 
• Users didn’t immediately understand how the rates table was laid out, and they didn’t
understand what the numbers were referring to.
Style D – Downtowndisneyhotels.com 
The Downtown Disney Hotels website is a single screen website, created in Macromedia Flash.
From a booking process design, what is interesting is that the user may jump in at any stage in
the process – for example selecting the hotel before the date or selecting the rate before the
number of rooms required.
We applaud iHotelier for the creation of the single-screen booking process although the current
system is not without its usability issues. In testing conducted by Travel UCD, seven of the 12
users were unable to fully use the website to calculate what an average daily rate for a hotel
would be in a particular month, a key requirement of a hotel reservation site.
We should be careful not generalise about single-screen booking processes based on just one
implementation – although this is a booking-process style to keep an eye on in the future – in
particular as the acceptance of Flash applications becomes more prevalent.
Summary 
If you are considering an exotic booking process style that is different to the norm, pay extra
attention to user-interface design issues. Users will not give you much time to learn how to use
your website. If they cannot grasp it, they may go to another less intimidating design.
Directory styles (E&F) 
One of the characteristics of a directory style website is that users select hotels from a list or
map.
The directory style (E) is very common with hotel chains for the following reasons:
• Enables the user to browse the hotel properties for information without having to enter a date
and commence the reservation process (the user's goal may not be to make a reservation) –
this is good for marketing the hotels
• There is minimal requirement for the user to compare rates and availability between different
hotels on the same website, unlike on the travel or hotel booking agency websites, as the user
may be looking for a specific hotel.
• Less technology dependent than evaluation style A or B
o Doesn’t require to implement search and evaluate functionality or extensive databases
o Doesn’t require to check rates and availability against multiple properties
o Can link to existing single property reservation pages
o Can be created in static HTML, rather than dynamic page creation
The directory style (E) is also very common with smaller budget websites. In particular, affiliates
and private / white labels of the leading hotel reservation websites tend towards creating