Every hotel website is the same website

Close your eyes and picture a hotel website

A full-screen video as the page opens. A date picker laid over it. Three cards right below: rooms, dining, experiences. A photo grid. A “Book now” button pinned to the corner. Testimonials at the end, a map, a footer with social icons.

Now try to remember which hotel that website belonged to.

You probably pictured the same website we did. Not because anyone copied anyone, but because this has become the “right” way to build a hotel website. And that is exactly where the opportunity lies for anyone willing to break away from it.

Are hotel websites really starting to look the same?

It’s not your imagination. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz measured the design of thousands of websites over 17 years. What converged most was layout, meaning how a page is organized: in a set of websites tracked from 2010 to 2019, the difference between them fell 44%.¹

The study covers the web as a whole, not hotels specifically. But the reasons the designers they interviewed gave go a long way toward explaining what we see in hospitality: shared code libraries, adapting everything for mobile, and the ready-made templates that website platforms offer. When everyone starts from the same base, everyone ends up in roughly the same place.

Journalist Kyle Chayka gave this phenomenon a name in the physical world: AirSpace, the same aesthetic repeated in cafés, offices and places to stay in cities all over the world, from exposed brick to filament bulbs.⁴ The web got there by a different road.

Why it happens when nobody sets out to look the same

Because each choice, on its own, makes sense.

A template gets the hotel online fast, with booking working. The homepage video is what you see on the hotels everyone admires. Three cards organize information in a way everyone understands. A grid holds any number of photos. A pinned booking button is good practice. None of these choices is a mistake.

The problem is the sum. When every choice is the safe choice, the result is a website that works but belongs to no one. It’s beautiful, it’s correct, and it would work just as well for the hotel next door.

There’s a second, quieter reason: the website is often treated as a technical deliverable rather than as the brand speaking. The request is usually for “a new website”, and a new website is what gets delivered. And the question “what does only this place have to say?” falls to no one.

What does looking like everyone else cost a high-end hotel?

For a budget hotel, looking like the others can even help: guests want predictability. In high-end hospitality, the math flips. People who pay more want to feel they’re somewhere that couldn’t exist anywhere else.

In a Harris Poll survey of more than 500 affluent U.S. travelers for Preferred Hotels & Resorts, almost 70% said luxury hotels have lost their soul to standardization. And nearly three in four said they won’t pay for a stay that feels generic.²

In another survey of 2,000 travelers, by Talker Research for Mews, 68% preferred personalized experiences to loyalty points. Among higher earners, the figure was 71%.³

Both surveys are about the stay, not the website. But the website is the first part of the stay: it’s where guests decide whether a place is special before they ever arrive. If the first impression is generic, guests are left with the one criterion that works for comparing identical things: price. That’s our interpretation, not a survey finding, but anyone who has ever compared three look-alike hotels in three browser tabs knows how it ends.

Being different or being recognizable: which one matters?

Brand science separates two ideas that often get blurred together.

Differentiation is being better or different at something: the bigger room, the view, the service. Distinctiveness is being recognized at a glance: the color, shape, word or gesture that tells people who something belongs to before they even read the name.⁵

According to Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, the ideal distinctive asset is one that everyone remembers and links to a single brand. And it has to be used every time, because memory fades.⁶

That changes the question. A template website can be beautiful, and even different in one detail. But if it has no element that belongs only to the hotel, used consistently, it doesn’t stick in anyone’s memory. The guest closes the tab and, a week later, can’t remember which hotel it was.

Distinctiveness isn’t extravagance. Sometimes it’s a color only that place uses, a word drawn from the story of the house, a way of photographing the morning light. What matters is that it’s true, that it’s theirs alone, and that it shows up every time.

What do Google and AI assistants have to do with it?

A lot. People now also ask AI assistants where to stay, and the assistants answer with whatever concrete facts they can find.

In its own guidance on helpful content, Google suggests that site owners ask whether their content provides “original information, reporting, research, or analysis” and whether it offers something “beyond the obvious”.⁸ Copy that promises “comfort and nature in a unique setting” fails that test, because it could sit on a thousand websites.

A study presented at the KDD conference in 2024 tested what makes content show up in the answers of AI search engines. Adding statistics, quotes and sources raised visibility by up to 40%; repeating keywords didn’t work.⁷ The study doesn’t measure “generic content”, but the takeaway is clear: if you have specific facts of your own, you have something worth citing.

A hotel holds plenty of facts no one else has: the year the house was built, where tonight’s fish comes from, who planted the tree in the courtyard, how many steps separate the room from the sea. The standard website tends to leave all of that out to fit the template.

A website that could only be yours, in practice

A made-up example, for illustration. A twelve-room inn in the mountains, with a kitchen that serves only what its garden and the valley’s growers bring in that week.

The standard website would have a drone video over the hills, three cards and a grid of photos of the rooms, the restaurant and the pool. Just like every other inn in those mountains.

On a website that could only be its own, the organizing idea would be something else: the week. The first screen would show what the garden is producing right now. The menu would change with the calendar, and so would the website. The rooms would be named after the valley’s growers. The color would be that of the local soil, and the same color would appear on the key card, the bill, the napkin. Booking would still be two taps away, but guests would get there knowing why this place and no other.

None of this depends on exotic technology. It depends on one question, asked before a single screen is designed: what does this place have that no other does?

What changes for the business

We won’t promise numbers before we know the place: every hotel is its own case. But the logic of the data above points to four changes.

• The conversation starts before price. When guests understand what only that place has, they compare experiences, not nightly rates.
• The brand works beyond the website. A distinctive element used consistently shows up on Instagram, in the confirmation email, in the room. Guests recognize it, remember it and recommend it.
• Your content becomes raw material for search and AI. Facts of your own, consistent across every channel, are what Google values and what assistants cite.
• The investment you already made starts paying off. Photos, history, architecture, cuisine: the hotel almost always has what it needs already. The website just doesn’t show it.