Hotels.com has a new look! A long over-do re-do of Hotels.com has cleaned up the user interface and toned down the jarring red of the old site. It appears to only be running on certain servers thus far so you may need to visit a few times before you get the new site.
Hotels.
com's phone number has been splashed prominently all over the site - five places alone above the fold! In addition, the
welcomerewards program has really become the centerpiece of the site, taking top billing in the largest font on the page. Both are great differentiators for hotels.com. Deals have also been migrated over to the right hand side of the page and brought up above the fold.
The search results pages have also been tuned up nicely as well. Once a user selects a hotel, they are now driven right to the booking/room type selections rather than the old "summary" page which gave information on the property and forced users to scroll down to book.
We are sure there are other enhancements as well - this is just a first pass. Now we need to go back and refresh our browser some more so we can get the new site rather than the old site!
These insights are excerpted with permission from Tom Botts' Hudson Crossing blog.