Hotel booking process design & usability

7.4 Multi-room check-out 
22. Special requests – Allow users to input a short text message specifying a request for each
room in a multiple-room reservation
23. Smoking / non-smoking – Allow users to specify whether each room in a multiple-room
reservation is a smoking or non-smoking room
24. Enable the user to enter a guest name for each room they are reserving
25. Indicate that these requests are requests only, and cannot be guaranteed by the hotel
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 
8 Conclusion 
Travel website design, like other large web design projects, is primarily about constraints and
trade-offs between competing approaches.
The examples of good design in this report represent best-case design in a non-constrained
world. The examples of sub-optimal design are highlighted not to criticise any particular
company but to serve as examples for future projects.
No one works in a non-constrained world. And an outsider cannot know what constraints have
been applied to any particular project – or even what the original project goal was. This can lead
external observers such as ourselves to make an incorrect conclusion based on incorrect
assumptions.
In general, hotel reservations websites have similar goals and are based on similar technology.
Therefore we are confident that much of the content in this report is directly applicable to all
hotel reservation websites.
Is there a perfect hotel reservation process? 
There is no such thing as the ‘perfect’ hotel booking process – only booking processes that are
better aligned to the needs of different marketplaces and different groups of users.
There are, however, two leaders in terms of user-interface design, among travel agencies and
hotel booking agencies in the B2C hotel reservation sector.
Expedia.co.uk is a good example of a website that allows users to evaluate different options in a
specific city (a ‘style B’ website). Our usability testing demonstrated that users found this hotel
evaluation easy to conduct. Nevertheless, the site still has a number of issues to deal with,
specifically with children and multi-room reservations.
Lastminute.com has made a significant improvement in their booking process design, releasing
a new user-interface during the period that the research was undertaken for this report. (Screen
shots of the new design can be seen in figure 8). We believe the design could be improved still
further if they considered developing a ‘style B’ website similar to Expedia.