TECHNOLOGY : WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT
customers with as much information as they need right at the point of purchase ,” says Gigi Deslauriers-Knop , senior director , online strategy and optimization , Carlson .
“ We also are considering elements of responsive design in our e-commerce strategy ,” she adds . “ While it ’ s a more significant investment , it has positive returns as mobile marketing continues to grow at such a rapid pace .”
Industry standard ? Responsive design allows a website to automatically resize itself to fit an Internet browser using CSS3 and HTML5 media queries , which access different assets as screen size changes . This allows the website to be conveniently viewed on a mobile device .
Most of the major hotel companies have dedicated mobile websites , but for hotel companies with fewer resources looking to create a mobile-optimized site , responsive design can have advantages . Instead of building multiple versions of the same site tailored for different browsers or requiring users to download a mobile app , hotel companies can create one website for all .
“ The ‘ write once , run everywhere ’ nature of responsive design provides development and maintenance efficiencies , simplified management and a consistent user experience ,” says Robert Cole , hotel technology consultant and founder of RockCheetah , Menomonee Falls , Wisconsin . “ The same URL being shared across platforms helps users access the same information anytime , anywhere .”
SilverNeedle Hospitality , Singapore , says using responsive design on its hotel websites has been cost-effective and has made it a benchmark for its website development . “ This strategic approach has allowed us to efficiently manage our website on a single platform ; as a result , we have minimized our development cost and avoided content duplication on multiple device-specific websites ,” says Mark Simmons , vice president ,
THE COST ( of adding TripAdvisor reviews to its website ) WAS REALLY MINIMAL , and the ROI is the longer retention of users and higher conversion ratio .”
– Jean-Luc Chrétien , executive vice president
sales , distribution & loyalty , Accor
sales and marketing , for SilverNeedle . “ More online users are viewing websites from their mobile phones and tablets — it is critical for us to distribute relevant content whenever , wherever and on whatever devices the customers want to access our information .”
Another cost-efficient web development platform SilverNeedle uses is Wordpress , the open-source content management system based on PHP and MySQL . SilverNeedle says its booking engine was easy to integrate into the responsive design website , and it plans to upgrade all its hotels ’ websites with responsive design .
SilverNeedle isn ’ t alone in implementing responsive design . Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts , Toronto , which spent US $ 18 million to relaunch its brand website in January , says it is working on adding responsive design elements to the site during the first quarter of next year . “ We believe that smartphones are best serviced through web applications , and clearly we ’ ll need to have a responsive web layer if we are to have any hope of servicing a mobile-centric future ,” says Robert Simon , director of interactive marketing for Four Seasons .
Opinion is divided on whether responsive design websites will become the industry standard , as some developers say dedicated websites and native applications optimized to leverage every feature of an operating system or hardware provide a better user experience . Also , responsive design presents new challenges to the website developer . More thought and planning is required to create a multi-platform website rather than a single-platform site , and HTML5 and CSS3 standards are still evolving . Given that various operating systems do not support all the functionality of others , there can potentially be cross-browser compatibility issues as well , especially with older browsers and hardware .
“ The developer must allow for many different screen sizes and aspect ratios ,” says Jon Inge , a hotel technology consultant based in Edmonds , Washington . “ They may have tools that help reformat these automatically to save time , but the basic layout must be carefully designed to present the same look and feel in many formats , and each must be tested .”
Read reviews and reserve Social media integration is more widespread than responsive design in hotel website development . Several of the major brands offer TripAdvisor or other user-generated reviews directly on their brand websites . Given the tendency for customers to check hotel reviews before booking , some hotel companies say integrating reviews directly onto the website helps keep the customer on their sites rather than surfing elsewhere before booking .
On its new website Four Seasons took the unique approach of adding a
58 HOTELS November 2012 www . hotelsmag . com