After leading a 16-month global website redevelopment for a luxury hotel, resort and beach club group, covering more than 20 hospitality businesses, Gretel Kutan shares six lessons from the client side about what needs to happen before, during and after the build.
Gretel Kutan, Founder, Luxury Hospitality Projects.
A major hospitality website redevelopment can look like a marketing project. New design, new photography, new copy, better technology; but from the client side, it is much bigger than that.
I led a 16-month redevelopment for a global luxury hospitality group whose business had evolved considerably since its previous website was built. What had started with beach clubs and restaurants had grown to include hotels, branded residences and additional concepts across multiple international markets. The digital estate had to evolve with it.
The project covered more than 20 businesses, multilingual requirements, two flagship concepts with their own websites that still needed to support each other’s discoverability, and a new group-level website built from scratch.
There were also evolving accessibility, privacy and compliance requirements to address, alongside the commercial objective that sits behind almost every hotel website redevelopment: make it easier for the guest to find what they need and ultimately drive more direct business.
The previous website had largely been approached through a Brand and Marketing lens. It looked good, but insufficient input had been gathered from the different parts of the organisation about what the website actually needed to do for them. Going into the redevelopment, I was determined not to repeat that mistake.
Six lessons from the project stand out.
1. Architecture comes before design
The most underestimated part of the project was not design or development. It was deciding the architecture of the site. We spent roughly four to six months working through the sitemap, hierarchy and relationships between different parts of the business before the build could really move forward.
What deserves priority? How visible should each division be? Where should a user enter? How quickly should they reach a booking journey? How should separate concepts relate to one another without confusing the customer? These sound like website questions. Most are actually business questions.
They become particularly important in hospitality because different products have very different customer journeys. A hotel stay involves a much longer decision than a restaurant table or a day at the beach club, for example. That difference affects the value of every click and every placement.
There were also occasions where what felt important internally was not necessarily what needed the greatest prominence externally. When opinion conflicted, data became an important way of breaking the tie. My biggest advice would be not to rush this stage. A sitemap is not an administrative document to approve before the interesting design work begins. It is where many of the most consequential decisions in the project are made.
2. A hospitality website cannot belong only to Marketing
Marketing should obviously have a major role in a website redevelopment. It just cannot provide every answer. For this project, I deliberately gathered input across Hotels, F&B, Sales, Marketing, Legal, IT, Brand and Design, and Communications. Each team saw something the others did not.
A requirement that appears insignificant from a brand perspective can be fundamental to Sales. Something commercially attractive may create a technical problem. A design decision can have accessibility implications. A beautifully written piece of brand copy may do very little to help somebody actually discover the page. The challenge is not to design a website by committee. That can be just as damaging.
The role of the client-side project lead is to extract the relevant requirements from each part of the organisation and then make decisions when those requirements conflict. That requires somebody internally with enough authority to move the project forward and enough understanding of the different parts of the business to know when a seemingly small objection actually matters.
Luxury brands naturally care enormously about how they present themselves. But the most beautiful expression of a brand is not always the most useful expression for the customer.
3. What the brand wants to show is not always what the customer needs to see
This became particularly obvious in two areas: content and imagery. Luxury brands naturally care enormously about how they present themselves. But the most beautiful expression of a brand is not always the most useful expression for the customer.
Photography was a good example. We had a significant amount of excellent content across the portfolio, but its consistency varied considerably by location. Brand teams naturally gravitate towards atmospheric photography: people, details, food, moments and close-up imagery that creates a feeling. Sales often needs something much simpler.
What does the venue actually look like? A prospective customer considering a stay, an event or a day at the beach club may need a wide view of the space, clear room-category photography or a much more functional understanding of the physical product. We discovered gaps in precisely those kinds of assets.
The same tension existed in copy. The language a luxury brand might naturally use in a press release is not necessarily the language that performs best for search and discoverability. Repetition, search-led terminology and question-based content can initially feel uncomfortable inside a carefully controlled brand environment.
The answer does not have to be filling a luxury website with generic SEO copy or endless FAQs. We found more brand-appropriate ways to create useful, discoverable content, including destination-led guides and editorial material. The important point is recognising that the tension exists.
A website has to express the brand, but it also has to help a customer find, understand and buy it.
An agency can provide the structure. The client still has to provide the decisions.
4. Content is infrastructure, not decoration
One of the easiest mistakes is to treat content as something that can be populated once the website has been designed. On a multisite hospitality project, that assumption becomes expensive very quickly.
Content needs to be audited early: not simply whether photographs and copy exist, but whether they exist consistently across the portfolio and whether they are actually suitable for the new customer journeys being designed.
We found that some locations naturally had much stronger content libraries than others. Room-category photography was particularly fragmented. Other assets existed, but not necessarily in the formats or perspectives the new site required.
Photo below: Gretel Kutan
The written-content workload was substantial too. Having someone inside the organisation who understands the brand language and can work closely with the agency is essential. It cannot simply be added to somebody’s existing workload as a small side project. At one stage we brought in additional support because of the amount of content work required.
If I were preparing another large multisite redevelopment, I would audit the entire content estate early and identify the gaps before the design starts to depend on assets that do not exist. Where necessary, that may mean organising photography across multiple locations before the website reaches the build stage.
A website being technically ready to launch does not mean the project is finished.
5. Launch is a phase, not a finish line
We allowed roughly two to three months around launch for testing and deliberately adjusted timing to avoid one of the busiest periods of the year. A major launch naturally creates issues, questions and adjustments. You want the people capable of solving them to be available. That sounds obvious, but launch dates are often treated as deadlines rather than operational decisions.
The work continued afterwards.
Over the following months we developed and refined guidelines and SOPs as we learned how teams were actually using the system. Maintenance was shared between the internal team and the agency rather than assuming everything could suddenly be brought in-house the day the website went live.
We subsequently added a separate SEO workstream to continue strengthening the estate. That experience reinforced something I think is easy to overlook when budgets and timelines are being agreed: do not resource only the website build. Resource what happens after it.
6. Get the structure right before launch, then improve the estate
There is an apparent contradiction in all of this. I believe strongly in spending the time upfront to get the architecture and fundamental decisions right. I do not believe every page of a large digital estate needs to be perfect before anything can launch. At some point, perfection starts delaying progress.
There were areas where we consciously prioritised what needed to be right for launch, mapped the work that could continue afterwards and came back to it systematically. Rather than filling hundreds of pages with average content simply to call them complete, some parts of the estate were improved progressively. Over the following 12 months, we expanded content and linking across individual locations considerably. The distinction matters.
There is a difference between launching unfinished and launching with a controlled improvement plan. The decisions that are difficult and expensive to reverse belong before launch. Other elements become better through use, data and learning.
One thing that made a project of this complexity manageable was having an agency that understood that distinction. The Hideout provided the frameworks, examples and questions I needed at the right stages, which helped me lead the decision-making internally. Consistent calls and a disciplined project-management system mattered just as much as the creative work when decisions across multiple departments inevitably took time.
An agency can provide the structure. The client still has to provide the decisions. That may be the biggest lesson from the whole project. A major hospitality website redevelopment may present itself as a Brand and Marketing exercise because the website is the visible result. But behind it sit questions about commercial priorities, customer journeys, technology, compliance, content, sales, operations and ownership.
The website is where those decisions become visible. Get them right, and good design has something solid to express. Get them wrong, and even a beautiful website will eventually expose them.
Gretel Kutan is the founder of Luxury Hospitality Projects, an independent practice providing reviews for luxury hotels, resorts and lifestyle F&B, including digital presence reviews, and specialist advisory on beach clubs, resort and lifestyle F&B. Her background spans close to fifteen years in luxury hospitality across brand, marketing, international business development and strategic projects.
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