A hospitality website is not a brochure. Treat it like one and every guest you’ve already earned – the ones who found you, liked what they saw, and were ready to book – has a good chance of finishing that booking on someone else’s platform instead of yours.
This is how we think about hospitality web design for hotels, pubs, restaurants and event venues in Birmingham and the West Midlands. Not “make it look nice.” Make it the thing that gets the guest to book direct.
The real cost of a brochure website
Most hospitality sites we look at have the same shape: good photography, a phone number, an “our story” page, and a link out to Booking.com, OpenTable, or a third-party events enquiry form. It photographs well. It doesn’t convert well.
Here’s what that setup is actually costing you:
- Commission on bookings you already earned. The guest found you – your site, your photos, your reviews – then completed the booking through a platform that takes a cut for the privilege of finishing what you started.
- No control over the guest relationship. Book through an OTA and the OTA owns the data, the follow-up, and often the guest’s attention during the booking journey, competitor listings included.
- A generic journey for every visitor. A couple looking for a Saturday night table, a bride planning a wedding, and a company booking a conference room are three completely different buyers. A single “contact us” form treats them all the same.
None of this shows up as an obvious problem day to day. It shows up as a slow, steady leak – guests you should have kept, spread across a dozen small frictions instead of one dramatic failure.
What we actually look for on a hospitality site
Before we touch a redesign, we check for the same signals every time:
- Is there a direct booking or reservation system on the site itself – not just a link out to a third party with no direct-book option of your own?
- Are the basics front and centre – menu, room types, opening hours, availability – or buried two clicks deep behind a hero image?
- How much of the page is OTA badges and third-party links, versus the business actually owning its own booking journey?
- Is there one booking path or several – one for a room, one for a table, one for a wedding enquiry, one for a corporate event – built for how people actually search, not one generic form for everyone?
A site that fails on two or more of these isn’t a design problem so much as a revenue problem wearing a design problem’s clothes.
What we did for The Limes Country Lodge Hotel
We rebuilt The Limes Country Lodge Hotel’s site in Solihull around exactly this problem. The Limes is a countryside hotel, wedding, and events venue, which meant the brief covered more ground than a typical hotel site – stays, dining, weddings, and conferences, each with its own buyer and its own booking journey.
Rather than routing everyone through the same enquiry form, the rebuild gave each audience a clear, direct path:
- Overnight guests get straight to room types and availability.
- Wedding enquiries get a dedicated journey suited to a much longer decision – couples don’t book a wedding venue in one visit, they research, compare, and come back.
- Corporate and conference bookings get the practical information that audience actually needs – capacity, AV, catering options – instead of wading through wedding photography to find it.
The result is a mobile-responsive site that treats a room booking and a wedding enquiry as the different journeys they actually are, rather than forcing both through the same generic funnel.
We don’t have hard before/after booking-volume figures documented for this project to quote here – if that data exists, it would strengthen this section considerably and we’d rather add it once confirmed than guess at a number.
Design alone won’t fix this
It’s tempting to sell a hospitality rebuild on aesthetics – better photos, a cleaner layout, a more “on brand” feel. All of that matters, but it’s not what actually moves the needle for a hotel, pub, or restaurant.
What moves the needle is removing every unnecessary step between “I’m interested” and “I’ve booked directly with you.” That’s a different design brief to “make it prettier.” It means:
- Booking availability visible without a click-through to a third party
- Menus and room information that load fast and read clearly on a phone, since most hospitality searches happen on mobile, often while someone is already deciding where to go tonight
- A checkout/enquiry flow with as few fields and as little friction as the business can get away with
- Trust signals – reviews, real photography, clear pricing where appropriate – placed where the guest is deciding, not buried on a separate page
A beautiful site that still routes guests through an OTA has solved the wrong problem.
What this looks like for your business
If you’re running an independent hotel, gastropub, restaurant, or events venue in Birmingham or the wider West Midlands, the fix usually isn’t “start again from scratch.” It’s making sure every visitor – whoever they are and whatever they came to book – has an obvious, low-friction way to do it directly with you.
We’ve been building websites for local businesses for 14 years, and hospitality is one of the areas we focus on most closely. Not because it’s the flashiest work, but because the return on getting this specific problem right – fewer guests leaking to OTAs, more direct relationships with the people who actually stay, eat, and celebrate with you – is some of the clearest we see across any industry we work in. You can see more of our work at veonmedia.com/work.
The takeaway
A hospitality website’s job isn’t to look good in a portfolio. It’s to get the guest who already found you to finish booking with you, not with whoever’s platform they land on next.
If your current site is mostly a brochure with a phone number, that’s not a branding problem. It’s a booking-journey problem, and it’s fixable.
Worth a conversation? Get in touch and we’ll take a look at what your current site is actually costing you in OTA commission.
Last Updated on 1 month ago by Dan
