Template Monster Blog

Today we’ve came up with a new review – this time it’s about the worst websites of hotels that are actually great. It’s hard to tell why they tolerate the designs like these – perhaps because they think they’ve done a good marketing job before and nothing can ever spoil their image. We’re sure there’s no need explain how wrong that position is. The websites in the list are arranged in direct proportion to how bad the design is and inversely to how famous the hotel is (so the worst website design of the best hotel would be #1 on the list). Anyways, time for some critique:

10. GoldBear Hotel

Ok, this one may not be the most famous hotel but it surely has the worst website design. It’s terribly outdated, the website layouts like this one were used back in 1990-s. As a matter of fact we even expected to see the photo of Jean-Claude Van Damme somewhere on this website and thought we’ve heard Vanilla Ice and East 17 singing in the background once we saw it all, after all that’d be quite easy to explain. On one hand since it’s not world’s #1 hotel it cannot afford a premium website, on the other hand – when you’re not on the top you have to do something to get there (including having a decent website).

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9. Hotel Opera

This hotel appears to be another fan of postcard-style (reminds me of the BlueHost.com website mentioned in the worst hosting websites post). It has absolutely unusable navigation menu and they seem to have used what we call a “chaotic” approach in arranging the images and functional clocks (not so functional after all). But hey – at least they have a Flash animation and a kick-ass favicon!

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8. ThePier Hotel

Apparently this website was supposed to be a Times Square of the hotels websites – check out all these dynamically moving texts all over the website! Another weird thing about them is that instead of one navigation menu they have – how many do you think? – yes, a whole lot of two! And it’s not about header and footer menu that are usually duplicated for user’s convenience, their header menu alone has 10 items – each confusing as hell! Not to mention the tiny size of the content area.

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7. CaesarPark-Rio Hotel

Ok, here’s another weird design. And this time it’s really weird – because without actually having a design (no really, what you see there is not a design) they DO have a Flash area. Plus there’s a navigation menu with items misplaced and an uncomfortable background image. That all, my friends, makes it #7 on our list – it’s not on a higher position only because it’s not really a top hotel.

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6. Adlon Hotel

Hotel Adlon Kempinsky is really a good hotel, there’s no doubt about that. In this case even worse it is for them to have a website like this. Even though it does have a design this design is far from what it should be – it should be a) wider that this and b) of better functionality than this – it’s kinda hard to work with the online reservation form (because it’s broken). But guess what they think saves them? Exactly, Flash animation!

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5. Millennium Los Angeles Hotel

Millenium Biltmore Hotel could be out of this list in several tiny conditions – a little bit more attention to the small things in the design. I mean it shows that they have invested into a good design, they even made some sort of trendy transparency in the sidebar (which is good without a doubt), they even have a nice functional Flash area with info tabs. But nevertheless texts are hard to read (because of the transparency) and the functional Flash area looks like something the designer didn’t plan.

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4. Savoy Hotel

Ahh, the great Savoy… Actually it was one step away from not being on this {s}hit-list – but not because their website is secretly good. Rather because they do not have a website at all. No really, it makes sense: no website – no website critique, right? What you see here is a Fairmont.com subpage, and that subpage is all that Savoy hotel has online.

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3. Ritz London Hotel

This website must have looked very cool when it was created – we’re thought it was like 10 years ago. But – strangely – it appeared to be that this variant of Ritz London hotel website was launched in 2005. The previous variant by the way also sucked, they’ve traded bad for worse. But we should give them a credit – in this case the Flash animation does save the day a little bit.

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2. Mandalay Bay Hotel

These guys have changed several variants of their website since 1998 (the year their first website was launched). Without a doubt – what they have now is the best of all they’ve had during all those years. But even so, such a big player as Mandalay Bay could surely do better. Hopefully next year they’ll change their design again, and this time into something really good.

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1. Bellagio Hotel

Now this is one really sad picture. Instead of the website Bellagio has what – another postcard? And that’s supposed to be a homepage – a first thing a visitor sees about this hotel. Plus, once again, the homepage is overloaded with the links that are as we all know harder to comprehend for the audience than media elements. Well, Bellagio, this is really something for you to think about.

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Well, that’s it. We’re sure we didn’t hurt the hotels’ feelings much (especially of the Top 5-4 hotels) but hopefully we gave them something to think about. After all, what we want is not to hurt someone, all we want is them to have websites that would correspond to how great these hotels are. And the easiest way to get a premium hotel website is of course by purchasing one of our premium hotel website templates (especially now when the 20% discount is active).

Written by Edward Korcheg

Edward has been with TemplateMonster blog since 2009 and is a great fan of social media and web development trends (especially jQuery and HTML5). In fact, HTML5 along with retro trucks are his two biggest hobbies. He dreams of one day coding himself a retro truck using nothing but HTML5 Canvas tag.

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