Hotel booking process design & usability

Style B: Users can see the rooms and rates on offer before selecting a specific hotel.
Example – how a user can choose between available hotels on a hotel website
Consider an example user who is looking for a double room for one night in London, on a known
date.
With style A, users have their first sight of the set of hotels available on the requested dates via
screen 2. They then select a hotel and move on to screen 3 to see the room rates. If no rooms
match the users preferences, they have to return to screen 2 (hotel display page) and select a
different hotel. They must repeat the back-and-forth navigation for every hotel they select.
With style B, users can scroll a single page up and down to determine whether the website has
any hotels with rooms that match their preferences. Then they select their hotel.
Travel UCD - consultants in travel and hospitality website design 
http://www.travelucd.com 

© Travel UCD Limited 2003. All Rights Reserved.

12

---

---

Hotel booking process design & usability 
Travel UCD – February 2003 
For a user who wishes to evaluate different rooms, rates and hotels, style B is significantly
preferable.
In the usability testing (summarised in the Appendix) we observed that all 12 users on the
Expedia website (style B) successfully evaluated different rooms, rates and hotels for known
dates in a specified city. The same users were not as successful at evaluating different hotel
options on the Opodo website (style A).
Notes on style A 

• Websites that implement style A should ensure that users can identify which hotels they

have viewed the rooms and rates on (e.g. change the colour of visited hyperlinks).
Notes on style B 
• Enables a user to quickly arrive at an ‘overview’ price for a city, for a specific date
• The user can evaluate between an expensive room in a cheap hotel, and a cheap room in
an expensive hotel, without significant forwards and backward screen navigation
• In our usability testing, we observed that users evaluated more hotels (checking for
required rooms or rates) on a style B website (Expedia) than on a style A website
(Opodo).
Style A or B is irrelevant if the user knows the name of the hotel they are looking for because
they do not need to complete an ‘evaluation’ activity.