Hotel booking process design & usability

Can these designs be combined? 
Yes, there is an opportunity for a company to combine the best elements from Expedia.co.uk and 
Lastminute.com. The resulting website would have a hotel-results page that displayed rates in 
each hotel (as for Expedia.co.uk and style B websites) while allowing the selection of different 
room types with different occupancies (as for Lastminute.com).
The results page would probably look similar to the screen-shot, below, from TravelSelect.com, 
now part of the Lastminute.com network.
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 
Figure 22: Hotel results page from travelselect.com (no longer live) 
Please note, the page design, highlighted in figure 22 above, does not comply with many other guidelines outlined in 
this report, such as the rate range, the per night rate break down etc. but these would be relatively simple 
improvements to make 
At the time of publishing, no live hotel-reservation website has a booking-process design that 
matches these aspects absolutely.
Last word 
Do not forget that, from the user's perspective, the quality of a website is not just about the 
booking process. 
Many other factors contribute to the user experience; such as appropriate marketing, helpful 
customer service, plentiful supply and spread of hotels at the right prices, well-written hotel 
descriptions and inspiring hotel photographs.
Travel UCD plans to write further reports on these issues in the future. To hear when further 
reports are published, please subscribe to the newsletter at http://www.travelucd.com 
Alex Bainbridge 
[e-mail] 
January 2003