I've decided that I'm going to take a mini-vacation in May and go to New York for nine days. Things have been über-busy at work, and I'd like to get to New York before it gets too hot.
I love W Hotels (have stayed at the San Francisco, Seattle and Chicago properties) and decided to check out their rates for New York in May. It appears that Starwood has recently launched a new website for the W brand and it is a total and utter gong show. It is likely the worst hotel site I have ever encountered for a brand of this size. I've only spent about ten minutes with the site, but I don't think I will be coming back...
A few things I noticed right away:
[1] The information architecture
The first time I tried to use the site I selected "W Destinations" and then "New York". If you select a destination you land on a "Where's Here" page. Huh? It isn't like W has hotels in obscure cities all over the world. Site visitors will likely know where New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seoul and Seattle are. After looking at the site in more detail it became obvious that I should have selected "W Hotels" as that would have produced a list of the actual properties...
In my experience people primarily visit a hotel site for three things — rates, deals and detailed hotel information (including large photographs). It might have been better for destination information to be integrated into the various hotel pages.
[2] Putting core information in pop-up windows
When you view the hotel details they appear in a tiny pop-up window. Huh? Why would you put your most important content in a little tiny window? Why wouldn't you take advantage of the fact that my laptop has a 15-inch screen? When you actually want to see more information you use a pull-down menu entitled "Explore More" which allows you to select a normal hotel page to view.
[3] The welcome agents are annoying
I thought the W experience was supposed to be wired, witty, welcoming and warm — not annoying and cheesy.
[4] The music is a neat idea but is executed poorly
Music is such a core part of the W experience that I think its use is justified on the site. That said, the player only plays thirty-seconds of each song and then jumps to the next one. I'm not previewing music in iTunes! If I was sitting in the living room of a W property and they were only playing thirty seconds of each song I would leave pretty quickly.
[5] Uhhhhh! Pulldowns over Flash are Bad
The pull down menus seem to conflict with the Flash movie on the homepage in Safari making them almost impossible to use. The help info says the site supports Safari, so I would assume that they would have done a decent job of QA'ing the site before launch.
[6] The date picker defaults to the end of 2008
Not sure why, but the date picker always goes to 12/31/2008 when you are using Safari. This doesn't happen across all Starwood properties (just some), so there must be an error in the way the picker is trying to capture the date from the browser.
[7] The comments box on the website
It is not large enough to document all the problems the site has :(
It surprises me that Starwood would get the Web experience so wrong, because they get the in-hotel experience so right. Both W and Westin are Wonderful (no pun intended), perhaps one day their online experience will be as well!

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