The Resort at Pedregal: Enter Through the Tunnel
A luxury hotel website sells the property when it leads with the one thing no competitor can copy, before a room card or rate appears. For The Resort at Pedregal in Cabo San Lucas that thing is physical: you reach the hotel by driving through a private 300-meter tunnel carved into the mountain, and you come out onto a cliffside estate facing the Pacific, inside a gated community, with a beach the rest of Cabo cannot get to. The site we designed opens on the arrival and the cliff, frames every casita's private pool and terrace as a structural feature rather than a bullet point, keeps the direct-booking path short, and runs weddings and groups as a parallel funnel for the planners who book the property whole. The integrated campaign around it won an HSMAI Adrian Award, Gold, in 2017. Every screen below is from the design as delivered; the property has since rebranded as Waldorf Astoria Los Cabos Pedregal, and its current site is not ours.
The property, in one sentence
There is exactly one hotel in Cabo San Lucas that begins with a tunnel. The Dos Mares tunnel runs about 300 meters through the mountain at the southern tip of the Baja peninsula and opens onto the Pedregal estate: casitas with private plunge pools climbing the mountainside, a beach only guests can reach, and a level of seclusion that the resorts on the Sea of Cortez strip cannot replicate. That is the whole brief. Everything else about the property, the dining, the spa, the wedding venues, is excellent and also available, in some form, at a dozen other places in Los Cabos. The tunnel and the cliff are not.
What the previous site did instead
The old website did the standard luxury-Cabo thing. Aspirational drone footage, a calendar widget, and the word "exclusive" without evidence. None of it conveyed the actual differentiator. A guest comparing five resorts on a phone in an airport saw five versions of the same sunset, and Pedregal's was not obviously the one worth the rate.
That is the most common failure on hotel websites, and it is not a design failure in the narrow sense. It is a strategy failure that design then dutifully executes: the site describes the category instead of the property.
The decision: make the architecture of the property the architecture of the site
Our role was creative direction, creative strategy, and UX/UI design. The central call was to organize the site the way the property is organized, so that a visitor's first ninety seconds online mirror the first ninety minutes on site.
The homepage opens on the arrival. The hero is the estate seen from above, cliff and beach in one frame, with a single line, and the booking button held in a fixed corner so it never competes with the image. Rooms, rates, and offers come after the visitor has understood where they would be.
Seclusion is structure, not a bullet. Every villa and casita gets photography that earns its rate, and the private pool, the private terrace, and the private path are framed as part of the room's architecture. On most luxury sites "private pool" is a line in a features list next to "minibar." Here it is the reason the room exists.
Booking stays short for direct bookers. The reservation flow is compressed to the minimum a guest needs, because the people who reach this site already know what Cabo is. The work of persuasion happens on the property pages, not in the booking engine.
Weddings and groups run as a parallel track. A wedding planner does not want the leisure funnel. The property is regularly booked whole, so weddings, groups, and events have their own path from the navigation down, with venues, capacities, and the arrival experience presented for the person who is buying two hundred room nights, not one.
The gallery is organized by the guest's questions. Not by the photographer's shoot list. Resort, rooms, dining, spa, weddings, experiences, in the order someone decides.
Things to do gets its own world. Los Cabos sells activity as much as rest, so the experiences section is a destination in itself: Baja by land, paddle boarding at sunrise under the arch, swimming with whale sharks, Espiritu Santo island. Each one is a full-bleed image with a short paragraph and one action, because on a phone a list of twelve activities is a wall and four big pictures are an invitation.
Mobile led the design. Most discovery for a property this aspirational happens on a phone in transit, not on a desktop in an office. Every section above was designed at phone width first and expanded, which is why the desktop layouts are unusually calm for a luxury site: they are phone layouts given room, not desktop layouts squeezed.
The result
The integrated campaign built around the site won an HSMAI Adrian Award, Gold, in 2017, the hospitality marketing industry's main award program. That is an award, not a booking number, and we are careful to say so; the property's direct-booking figures were theirs to keep. What the award recognized was the thing this post is about: a site that let the property's real difference do the selling instead of describing the category.
The property today operates as Waldorf Astoria Los Cabos Pedregal, same tunnel, same cliff. Its current website is a Hilton property and not our work. The screens here are the design as it shipped.
What carries to an independent property in 2026
Three things from this project apply to any hotel that has something nobody else has, which is most independent hotels and almost no chain properties.
- Find the one physical fact and lead with it. A tunnel, a cliff, a ranch of 30,000 acres, a rooftop the city can see. If your homepage could belong to a competitor with a logo swap, it is describing the category. Brush Creek Ranch leads with the land; Hard Rock Hotels leads with the music. Pedregal leads with the arrival.
- Treat the differentiator as structure. If seclusion, or the view, or the kitchen is the reason to pay the rate, it belongs in the room's architecture on the page, with photography that proves it, not in a features list.
- Separate the funnels that are actually separate. Leisure guests, wedding planners, and group buyers are three different purchases. One path that tries to serve all three serves none. This is the same argument as understanding user intent on travel websites, applied to a single property.
The way we now sell this work is on a fixed price, which the agency world still mostly refuses to publish. The tiers are on the hotel website design page: a build on our Aurelia template, a custom design from the property up, or a platform for a group. If you want the arrival experience read from the inside first, that is Property Discovery, a residency at the property before a pixel moves. And if you would rather start with a number, the free Hotel Website Grader scores your current site in a minute. The full case study is at The Resort at Pedregal; the rest of the hospitality work is on Travel and Hotels.
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