Hotel Straf

So many design hotels include the Hotel Costes style ambient music to show they are hip.

Straf uses a strange spoken whisper sound that is distinctive. Likewise the tiled background for the homepage. So, I dont really like it, but I like the fact that it is trying to be different. I dont like the red typography and the whole can do with a clean up and a tighter design!

Hotel Q Berlin

Hotel Q : Berlin inside page

Hotel Indigo in Atlanta Homepage

Hotel Indigo Homepage

Hotel Lancaster Paris

Lancaster homepage

so the hotel is cooler than thou, but the website is not. The flash intro is poorly done with Hotel Costes style music that repeats every ten seconds in a slightly glitchy way.

What really strikes me about this site is that it is lacklustre and cannot decide its idiom: classical or cool. I think i would prefer really typocgraphically excellent design, no music and a very timeless quality

Hotel Lancaster inside page

Kasbah Tamadot in Morocco

Kasbah Tamadot Homepage

so here's my beef: it opens with a pop-up that quotes loads of package prices. Very like Virgin to try to be a cool brand and be highly commercial at the same time! It's all flash which is fine, but what i dislike is the silly marketing prose which does not work online and why do they hide the images in the gallery rather than show them with the text. The photos are beautiful and really enticing, but they are not doing their job.

Morocco is all about sensuality: this site seems to miss that for London W1 PR.

Kasbah Tamadot Inside page

Commune Hotel China

This hotel is gaining a reputation as one of the world's coolest hotels. The website throws up an interesting problem: it is built in flash and must be on the slowest connection of any website I have ever been to. The homepage took 20 minutes to download ! I tried it on a couple of other occassions and it was always this slow.

It made me remember that most hotel website visitors are often far away.

What should Commune Hotel do? Probably get an English language website hosted on a server farm in the US or Europe. Their homepage should not be flash, but a minimal html page

Establishment Hotel Sydney

There is a real cultural question about big hotel chains can manage small, cool boutique hotels. Why? The big chains are about achieving uniformity, uniform processes, uniform suppliers, uniform uniforms... Boutique is about the unexpected, the twist. Here is a hotel attempting the unexpected, the esoteric and their parent has foisted on them the example par excellence of the chain hotel website.
Is it just me, or...

Moog hotel and bar in Sydney

Mooghotel in Sydney

Shore Club Miami

home page

Shore Club must be one of the hippest hotels in Miami area. Brother to Delano and more chic. Interesting that they have chosen such a quiet website that has no sound and relies on text and limited pallette of images.

The site is 2 years old and is beginning to show it. I would have used bigger images and less text. see the scrumptious hotel images in the photo gallery which really show the place off.

I dont like the home button being on the right of the screen especially when your typography is so subdued. It was some time before I saw it.

The homepage is weird because it goes straight to deals - makes you wonder whether they are making enough money!

A hotel like this should use an affiliate network to sell deals and keep their brand high and the prices too

Shore Club Miami

inside page

Hotel Victor in Miami

Hotel Victor Miami South Beach

new an already fashionable hotel in Miami's South Beach area. Comes complete with aural and enviromental music, etc. See below for comments on 2005's idee du jour.

The website uses flash quite elegantly, but suffers from the pop up window flash syndrome. Designers do hate their users to have access to toobars, and back buttons. It will be interesting to see how long it takes them before they dump flash elements and replace with normal HTML.

The problem with the flash system is that whatever the qulaity of design, the website still behaves like so many mid market hip hotels...