LUXURY HOTEL MANAGEMENT

Toga Hotels is one of the largest hospitality management company in Australia, offering more than 65 apartment hotels across Australia, New Zealand and Europe.

Each of the five brands managed by Toga Hotels has their own identities and offer unique experiences. Our challenge was to tell a comprehensive Toga Hotels story that would unify all the brands, and showcase the breadth of offerings while people find and discover properties across all three countries. Most importantly, we would make it easy for people to book hotel reservations no matter where they are. While at Sabre Hospitality Solutions, I collaborated with the team to lead the design of a new web presence for Toga Hotels.

Client
Toga Hotels

My role
UX, and Visual Design at Sabre Hospitality Solutions

Recognition
WebAward for Outstanding Achievement in Hotel and Lodging category

W3 Awards for Hotel and Lodging category

Sketching possible solutions

After defining user needs and business goals, I started sketching possible solutions for the team can review and test internally. Our goal was to align and prioritize on all the features that best meet users’ needs.

Toga Hotels sketch

A responsive Toga Hotels

A homepage experience that makes a good impression. The full-width images offer an immersive, at-a-glance look at some of the featured properties within the Toga Hotels umbrella. We designed “the brand strap” as part of the global header to promote brand awareness. Each logo is linkable to its own landing page. The reservation console is a persistent, global feature making it convenient for people to reserve no matter where they are on their journey. On tablet and mobile, the reservation console collapses to minimize distractions while people browse.

TogaHotels_responsive

Tablet expandable menus

The expandable menu on tablet leverages the entire screen to display information, allowing users to focus without distractions.

TogaHotels_tablet

Dynamic branded pages

The landing page template was designed to accommodate the need for each brand to use its own visual identity and brand colors.

TogaHotels_interior

Search results and filter features to help users find what they need

The search results page give users an at-a-glance essential information about each property. This includes special offers, amenities, TripAdvisor Ratings, and map of its location. For advanced search, the filtering system feature allow users to find properties according to their budget, destination and dates.

TogaHotels_search

Conclusion

Overall, this project was a great challenge due to the vast amount of content and the many different conversion tunnels. I had a lot of fun collaborating with the team to simplify the user journeys, and features through continuous sketching and critiques. The client was a pleasure to work with as they understood our challenges with making a very complex site not only easy to use but responsive across all platforms and devices. They were good partners in asking good questions to challenge our thinking throughout the project. The final product was well received and earned us an Outstanding Achievement WebAward in the Hotels and Resorts category. If I could change anything about this engagement, I’d like to work closer with developers to set a performance budget so that the site load time is optimized. Due to the amount of large images and visual artifacts on the site, I would’ve liked more time to test and help the team optimized for performance.