Case Study · Hotels & Hospitality
An IHG flagship hotel in the heart of Auckland, and a website with one job: make the direct booking the obvious choice. Big-brand polish from a boutique Australian studio.
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Web Design · Auckland, New ZealandCrowne Plaza Auckland is an IHG hotel in the centre of one of Australasia's busiest cities. Guests arrive at the website from every direction: comparison sites, search, brand campaigns, word of mouth. Most of them are one tab away from booking somewhere else.
The brief had two demands that usually fight each other. The site had to carry the weight of an international hotel brand, where every image, margin and word is held to a global standard. And it had to sell like a local: rooms, dining and the Auckland location presented so convincingly that the guest books direct instead of drifting back to a third-party platform.
For a boutique Gold Coast and Brisbane studio, this was the international brand test. Trans-Tasman delivery, big-brand expectations, no room for a shade of colour off.
Every section of the site was designed backwards from one moment: the guest deciding to book direct.
A custom design and build that sits comfortably inside an international hotel brand's visual world - polished, restrained and consistent to the pixel.
Room types presented the way guests actually choose them: imagery first, the details a glance away, and the path to book never more than one step from view.
The whole layout funnels toward booking with the hotel directly - clear calls to action placed where the decision actually happens, not buried in a menu.
Restaurants, bars and hotel experiences given room to breathe, because guests book the stay they can already picture themselves in.
Location sold as a feature: the city at the doorstep, presented for the business traveller and the weekender alike.
Travellers plan on phones, in transit, on hotel wifi. The site was built to load fast and stay effortless wherever the guest happens to be.
Hotel websites fail in one of two ways: they drown the guest in options, or they flatten a premium stay into a listing. The craft on this project was knowing what to leave out.
We let the photography do the persuading and kept the interface almost invisible: generous space, quiet typography, and a visual rhythm that feels like walking into a well-run lobby. Every page answers the guest's next question before they ask it - where will I sleep, what will I eat, what's outside the door, how do I book.
Working across the Tasman changed nothing about the standard. Same process, same one point of contact, same rule we apply to a local tradie site: if it doesn't help the guest decide, it doesn't go on the page.
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