Hotel Mare – case study

Hotel Mare is a three-star hotel on the seafront in Agropoli: a pool, a private sun deck over the water, a restaurant and seven room types ranging from the 26 sqm Deluxe to the Economy with a hillside view. The site speaks to three audiences in three languages, and has to bring all of them to the same place: the booking engine.

The constraint that shaped the project

Seven room types are a hard choice to make blind. "Sea view" and "side sea view" mean nothing to someone who has never seen the building, and a guest who misses the difference postpones the booking or takes it to a third-party portal, where the commission goes to someone else. The difference had to be visible before the dates were even picked.

How it works

• A page for every room type with floor area, beds, occupancy and photographs of the actual view from the balcony: the comparison is made by looking, not by reading.
• An availability form on the home page with check-in, check-out, rooms and guests, passing the parameters straight to the Ericsoft booking engine.
• Italian, English and French across the whole site, because Cilento in July is not an Italian-only market.
• Dedicated accessibility and sustainability pages: ramps, a ground-floor room, a wooden deck at the water's edge, solar panels and dispensers in place of single-use products.
• The restaurant and the beach as sections of their own, not entries in a list of amenities: each is a reason to choose the hotel on its own.

The part you do not see

The form on the site is not the booking engine: it is a handover. It collects dates and guests and opens Ericsoft with the parameters already set, so nothing has to be typed twice. The division of labour is deliberate — persuasion stays with the site, which has the photographs and the descriptions, and the transaction goes to the engine, which has the rates and the availability. Every extra step before the engine costs bookings; every argument made after it, on a payment screen, goes unread.