The booking happens here, not on Expedia
WebsiteSEOEmail
Cliff Cottage Inn is four restored historic buildings and seven suites in downtown Eureka Springs, Arkansas. The oldest is the 1892 blue cottage named Cliff Cottage after one of the town's first mayors, which is where the Inn gets its name. Guests have left it more than 1,300 reviews across four booking platforms.
Those same platforms are the competition. Each one takes a cut of a reservation the Inn could have taken itself, so the site has one job ahead of all the others: be a better place to book than the four sites that already have the traveler's card on file. Nearly everything on it follows from that.
The first screen
The rooms do the talking before the copy does
Twenty-four seconds of the suites and the buildings play behind the headline, cutting one to the next. A hotel is bought on how it looks and nothing else argues that as fast as footage of the actual rooms. There is a pause control beside it, because a video nobody can stop is a video somebody leaves.
The first screen is the rooms, moving, with a pause control beside them
The rooms
Seven suites, seven namesakes
Sarah Bernhardt, Colette, Emily Dickinson, Robert Stevenson, Alfred Tennyson, Henry Thoreau and Zelda. Each card carries the bed, the view and a line about what makes that room different, because a guest choosing between seven rooms in one building is making a real decision and deserves the information to make it.
The client edits this themselves, in the CMS
A suite page
Everything a booker checks, on one screen
Square footage, bed, floor, the amenity list down to the brand of coffee, a photo strip, a room tour and the booking button at the top. This is the page where somebody decides, and the questions they are asking are specific ones. Answering them here is what stops the tab being closed to go and ask elsewhere.
The client edits this themselves, in the CMS
The extra mile
Each room's namesake gets a biography
Zelda Fitzgerald's room comes with Zelda Fitzgerald, drawn and written up, under the guest reviews and above the other suites. It is the kind of detail that costs a paragraph and gets remembered, and it turns a room number into something a guest will tell somebody about afterwards.
The client edits this themselves, in the CMS
Proof
The competition's scores, shown on purpose
TripAdvisor 4.8, Google 4.7, Expedia 9.4, Booking.com 9.2, named platforms and real counts, in a band that runs on every page. Borrowing the credibility of the sites you are trying to book around is the trick: a traveler who trusts those numbers no longer needs to go and check them.
Questions
Thirty-three answers, filtered as you type
Pets, parking, check-in, breakfast, security deposits, accessibility. All of it on one page with a keyword filter, so somebody with one specific worry finds it in a second rather than reading thirty-two answers that are not theirs. The counter tells them how many are left.
The client edits this themselves, in the CMS
Being found
Twenty-two guides to the town, not to the inn
Ghost tours, Lake Leatherwood, Bikes Blues and BBQ, the haunted hotels. Every topic was picked against real search and answer-engine demand, then written to rank for it. Somebody searching for what to do in Eureka Springs is six months from needing a room and is exactly the person worth meeting early, so the articles answer their question first and mention the Inn second.
The client edits this themselves, in the CMS
Photography
A gallery that is allowed to be big
One page, every room and every corner of the property, at a size where the woodwork and the linen read. Hospitality is the one category where a visitor genuinely wants more photographs than you think, and making them hunt across seven suite pages for them is how you lose a browser.
The client edits this themselves, in the CMS
Forty photographs on one page, no pagination
The list
A welcome, then one a month, every month
Ten percent off a first stay to join, a welcome email that lands immediately, and then a send a month: what's on in Eureka Springs, what's worth driving out for, which suites are open. Somebody reading about next month's festival in January is somebody booking a room for it, and the list belongs to the Inn in a way a platform booking never will.
One welcome, then one a month, every month
Under the hood
Theirs to change
Suites, articles, FAQs and the page copy all live in the CMS. A rate change, a new photograph or a thirty-fourth FAQ does not need me.
Booking stays where the business runs
The site hands off to the reservation system the Inn already runs on, so availability and rates have one home and the front desk learns nothing new.
The booking that got away
An abandoned-booking recovery service watches reservations that start and do not finish, and follows up. In this category that is most of them.
Email is a system, not a send
A monthly letter, a welcome for new local-chamber contacts, and a preferences page guests reach from any email without typing anything in.
Every form is protected
A bot check runs on the signup paths and is verified on the server, with a hidden field catching the cruder attempts before that.
Watched four ways
Product analytics, session recordings and two ad platforms' conversion tracking, so a booking can be traced back to what brought it.
Thirty-eight pages load quickly
Every suite and article is rendered before a guest asks for it, so a site carrying this much photography still opens fast on a phone in a parking lot.
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Craig WoodCEO, Definian
Your great work deserves to look great.
Twenty-five minutes. Tell me what you're trying to do and who needs to see it, and I'll tell you what I'd build first and roughly what it costs.