How to Use Storytelling in Hospitality Website Design
To use storytelling in hospitality website design, choose a distinctive, verifiable property detail and carry it into useful navigation, room descriptions, calendars and galleries. In our designs, Pedregal's tunnel arrival, El Ganzo's recording studio and The Maven's local makers provided concrete starting points. Those examples do not establish that every property needs one exclusive story or the same layout. Below are six working principles from those projects, with dated observations of what later sites retained.
Why "tell your story" usually fails
Key Takeaways
- Turn a distinctive property fact into the site's information structure.
- Give experiences concrete names, dates, conditions and actions.
- Keep booking usable while expressing the brand.
- The examples describe design decisions, not measured booking lifts.
The project observations below are documented in the linked case studies. References to later live builds describe checks made in September/October 2026, not a fresh guarantee that those sites remain unchanged.
Most hotel sites that try storytelling do it in the wrong place. The homepage is a booking widget over a pool photo, and the story lives on an About page, a click away from anything a guest came to do. Or the story is adjectives: timeless, curated, exclusive, unforgettable. A guest comparing five properties on a phone reads past all of them, because every competitor uses the same words.
Our working approach is to connect specific property details to the parts of the site guests use: the menu, room list and offers. That gives a later team more to work with than an isolated About paragraph. Neither copy nor structure is guaranteed to survive a redesign.
Rule 1: Find a distinctive fact you can substantiate
Look for details relevant to the guest's choice. Some properties have several useful details; others differentiate through a combination of location, services and experience rather than an exclusive feature.
- The Resort at Pedregal, Cabo San Lucas: the private tunnel through the mountain creates a distinctive arrival beside the Pacific. We used that arrival as a design theme without needing a claim of exclusivity across Cabo. The integrated campaign around the site we designed won an HSMAI Adrian Award, Gold, in 2017.
- Hotel El Ganzo, San José del Cabo: an artist residency and a recording studio that happened to rent rooms.
- The Maven, Denver: the hotel inside Dairy Block, with art in the rooms from people who live along the Front Range.
- Bisha, Toronto: Lenny Kravitz-designed rooms, a Studio Munge interior and Akira Back's restaurant.
Generic words such as “luxury” need supporting detail. If a rival could use the same sentence unchanged, ask what specific view, service or experience would make the description more useful.
Rule 2: Put the story on the first screen, before the rooms
At The Maven we designed a homepage with three variants, an artist, a photographer and a designer, each full bleed, credited in the corner the way a magazine credits a photograph, with the hotel's script wordmark across the image like a signature on a canvas. The rooms came later, once the visitor knew what kind of place this was. That site won IAC Best Hotel and Lodging Website, an HSMAI Adrian Gold and a W3 Silver in 2017.
For a visitor arriving at the top of the homepage, the first screen is an opportunity to introduce that detail. Keep the booking action discoverable and test whether guests understand both the property and the next step.
Rule 3: Give the story inventory
A story becomes something a guest can act on when it has names, dates and a button, in the same visual shape as a room card.
At El Ganzo we ran a cultural calendar directly under accommodations on the homepage, in three lanes: music, artist in residence and wellness. Each card had a name, a date and an action. A residency with a date on it is a reason to pick a particular week. "Art and music" in a paragraph is not. The Arts and Music page treated the El Ganzo Sessions video archive as a channel, browsable by year, rather than filing it under press.
Rule 4: Count it
A documented number can make a claim more concrete, but only if its scope, date and source are clear. Our 2017 Maven design used a photograph to introduce the art story. A later art page can deepen that story by naming artists, explaining commissions and showing where the work appears. Link an inventory before quoting an exact collection count; do not turn an undocumented number into a selling point.
If your story is a vineyard, count the acres. If it is a history, give the year and the name. If it is a chef, name the dishes and the producers.
Rule 5: Name things in the brand's vocabulary
The menu and the room list are where a story either carries through or quietly dies.
The El Ganzo navigation we designed read Why?, Grab Now!, Goodies, Sleep, Love and Friendship, Planet Care, Going Ons, Arts and Music, Explore. The labels did the work homepage copy usually has to do. The one action that must never be clever, Book Now, stayed in plain language, in red, in the corner.
The Maven's later team took the same idea further on its own: the rooms are now Apprentice King, Journeyman King, Craftsman Two Queens, Master King and Maker's Suite. The maker story became the room ladder. That is what a clear story does: the next team can extend it without asking the agency.
Rule 6: Keep the booking path out of the story's way
The story earns attention. It must never cost a reservation. On every property above, the booking bar sat in the same corner on every template, from the hero to the footer, so the page below could be as editorial as the brand could carry. At El Ganzo, Book Now opened an overlay in the hotel's own illustration style before the booking engine took over, so the story did not end in a grey form.
Storytelling also does not replace a price. Our room cards at El Ganzo carried a "from" rate on each one. A guest comparing hotels on a phone needs the number one scroll from the front door, however good the story is.
What survives a redesign, and what does not
The useful test of a hospitality story is whether it outlives the site. We checked the live sites of two of these properties this year; both are later builds by other teams.
At El Ganzo, read again on 6 October 2026, the homepage still opens on "It's a trip, not a destination" and describes music as the foundation of the hotel, with a recording studio in the basement. The structure we set is intact too, with the voice sanded off: Planet Care became Sustainability, Going Ons became Happenings. The full before and after is in our Hotel El Ganzo case study.
At The Maven, the makers left the homepage for a video, but the art got its own page and the room names took on the story. The details are in The Maven Denver case study. At Pedregal we used the tunnel as a structural theme, as documented in The Resort at Pedregal case study.
These examples suggest a practical question for the next redesign: which details help guests understand the property and complete their task? Preserve or revise the voice and structure according to that evidence, rather than assuming one will always outlast the other.
The short answer
Write down a distinctive, verifiable fact about the property. Give it a place in the structure, with useful names, dates and actions. Then ask a guest to explain the difference between this stay and the alternatives and complete a booking task. The hotel website grader checks source-HTML signals; that does not replace testing the actual journey. NN/g's credibility research supports concrete, current information over vague reassurance.
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