An editorial site for a hotel that already had a story.
Harbour Grand is a 78-room boutique harbour-front hotel with a hundred-year story and a website that didn't tell any of it. We rebuilt on custom WordPress with photography-led design, a custom-styled SiteMinder booking flow, and editorial neighbourhood guides — lifting direct bookings 29% and dropping OTA commission spend.
Outcome
Photography
Stack
Engagement
The brief
Build the website the hotel deserves and shift booking share away from OTAs.
Harbour Grand had been losing 22% of revenue to OTA commission. The website did not give them a path back — generic booking widget, weak photography, no rate-parity messaging, no editorial weight to compete with the brand experience the hotel actually delivered. The brief: rebuild as an editorial site that defends the brand and earns the direct booking.
What we hear most
The starting state.
Booking widget broke the design
SiteMinder embed appeared as a third-party widget with different type, colour, and interaction model. Visitors regularly bounced to Booking.com.
Photography was OTA-tier
Same photos that appeared on Booking.com — flat, lit by reception lighting, no creative direction.
Rate parity wasn't communicated
Direct rates were equal-or-better than OTAs. The site didn't tell visitors that.
Multilingual was Google Translate
International guests (40% of bookings) experienced Google Translate'd content. Bookings from non-English markets ran below benchmark.
Mobile UX was hostile
Most hotel research is mobile. The site was designed desktop-first. Mobile booking conversion was 0.4%.
What we deliver
What we shipped.
12-week build covering editorial design, photography production, custom-styled booking, and proper multilingual.
Design system
- Editorial type system with serif/sans pairing
- Photography direction and full property + neighbourhood shoot
- Mobile-first patterns reworked from 375 up
- Motion polish that respects the calm of luxury
- Trust signals: awards, sustainability, history
Booking flow
- SiteMinder integration custom-styled to brand
- Real-time availability checking on rooms pages
- Best-rate guarantee messaging designed in
- Multi-room and package booking
- Cart UX matched to brand voice
Editorial content
- Per-room pages with editorial story and photography
- Neighbourhood guides (12 long-form pieces)
- Events, weddings, meetings dedicated flows
- Sustainability and heritage editorial pages
- Editorial blog cadence rebuilt
Multilingual + SEO
- Proper WPML setup with English + French + German + Spanish
- Locale-tagged sitemaps with hreflang
- Hotel, LodgingBusiness, Room schema
- Local + experience + occasion landing pages
- Real-user CWV monitoring
Process
How this service runs end to end
The same six-step shape we use across every Haxtiv project — adapted to the specifics of this scope.
01
Discover
Audit, intent, and the part nobody is saying out loud
We open with a working session — not a deck. We pull analytics, crawl the existing site, audit the brand, and interview the people closest to revenue. We surface the friction inside the team, not just the friction on the screen.
02
Define
Sitemap, story, and the metrics that actually matter
We define the audience journeys, the commercial pages we are willing to defend, the SEO architecture, and the measurable outcomes. You get a shape of the project that survives feedback because it was built on evidence.
03
Design
Editorial system, art-directed, never templated
Type, grid, motion, and tone built as a system. We design the hero, the long pages, the unloved corners, and the empty states. Every screen looks like it belongs to the same studio. Nothing is parked for later.
04
Build
Production code your team can keep
WordPress, Shopify, or page builder — we build clean, accessible, performant, and documented. Component-led, naming you'll recognize next year, and a changelog your in-house team can read.
05
Launch
Migration without losing rankings or sleep
Pre-launch crawl, redirect map, schema and metadata cutover, performance baseline, and a launch playbook. We run the deploy with you, not at you.
06
Grow
Care plan, CRO sprints, and quiet improvements
We stay involved. Monthly performance reports, security and core updates, and CRO sprints that compound. The site gets better the longer you keep us.
What this looks like in production
Numbers we earn, not numbers we round up.
Sites shipped
across 27 countries
Studio hours
delivered since 2019
Avg conversion lift
post-redesign clients
Client retention
into year two
In their words
Senior teams who chose us.
Haxtiv replatformed our marketing site without losing a single ranking. We saw organic leads up 38% inside the first quarter and the editorial team finally has a layout system they don't fight.
Mara Iglesias
VP Marketing · Lumenwave Health
Headless WordPress redesign
Our previous Shopify build was a Frankenstein of apps. The Haxtiv team simplified the stack, rebuilt the PDP and CRO patterns, and our store is faster and more profitable than it has ever been.
Daniel Korver
Founder · Northbound Goods
Shopify Plus rebuild
Frequently asked
Answers worth asking for.
Don't see the question you're holding? Send it to [email protected] and we'll answer the same day.
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Where to go next
Brief us
Got a hotel or hospitality brand that has to win direct? Let's talk.
30-minute call. We'll review the property and share an honest scope.