Days Inn Westminster – Innovative ‘one screen’ Flash reservation system

Design, XHTML, CSS, Flash, ActionScript, PHP, MySQL, YouTube Video Integration, Secure Hosting, Credit Card Processing

About Days Inn Westminster

Days Inn Westminster is 3-star hotel located in the central London, only ten minutes walk from Victoria rail and bus station. Days Inn hotels are new entrants to the British hotel market, offering high standards of accommodation and outstanding value for money. The combined group represents over 2,500 hotels around the world, with an ever-increasing presence in the UK mid-range market.

Need and Requirements

Verecom was first approached by Days Inn in 2004 with a simple request to redesign their website. However, just a few months later, Days Inn decided to stand out from the crowd and have an innovative website that would boost their online image and increase their number of reservations. Our expertise in the latest web technologies and techniques, combined with innovative thinking, gave birth to the an interactive single page booking system where all the booking processes are done on a single page.

Solution and Involvement

The production of the detailed brief was followed by the process of Information Architecture that resulted in the creation of the website structure & organisation and the wire-frames for the home page and inner pages. This gave the artists the green light and the visuals were then designed.

Hours of meticulous planning resulted in a detailed functionality description document before the development work began. The precise planning ensured a smooth development phase, after this the interactive hotel website featuring the subsequent sections was launched:

Reservation

This highly attractive and interactive part of the website is updated dynamically, allowing a faster response to the user's interaction. Showing the search results in real-time with no page refresh allows visitors to make a reservation in just a few clicks. This ensures the smoothest possible booking experience, while making the whole process extremely enjoyable and simple.

Virtual Tour

The 360° Virtual Tour provides visitors with an authentic and realistic view of the hotel’s interiors and exteriors. It gives a feeling of being in the hotel itself and it is an important factor for many visitors when making a decision about booking a room.

My Days Inn

This important section allows guests to post their feedback which is then approved by a website administrator before going live. The updatable spot dedicated for the Days Inn manager allows visitors to be kept up-to-date with the latest news in the hotel.

Newsletter

This powerful marketing tool allows full management of the mailing list and easy submission of an email template to thousands of subscribers.

HTML Version

The full flash website has its HTML version that allows search engines to cache dozens of pages and easily read their content.

Result and Conclusion

These innovative web solutions for Days Inn moved it into the leading position in online hotel business and perfectly reflect their corporate slogan ‘Your next stay is just a click away’.