Sometimes classy, exquisite venues have poor, or even terrible, websites that not only annoy but frustrate users and impede traffic and bookings.

Critique and vent here. You'll have sympathetic company and some venues may be motivated to make changes for the better.

Award the rare kudos when merited.



The website that currently is giving me fits is Cap Juluca:
https://www.belmond.com/hotels/caribbean/anguilla/belmond-cap-juluca

This website features TINY-FONT, PALE-GREY text against a white background. It's as if they set out to make the site as difficult to read as possible. Also, no sample menus -- a basic requirement.

Bingo!

What would you expect to see?

Pictures of the actual room, not generic pictures used for all the room categories. FS is really bad about this at times, it’s like the same pictures for all the rooms, which provide zero detail.

I still chafe over our stay three years ago at Four Seasons Rancho Encantado in Santa Fe. The website showed the top room category with a hammock on the terrace. Right. No hammock. Despite my overtly expressed annoyance, no hammock ever appeared. No apology either, much less recovery.

I definitely agree with that. However, I can think of many reasons why they use very general photography. At hotels and resorts that have a wide range of layouts and locations within the same categories, they do their best to use pictures that represent the decor and concept, without running into problems with people assuming pictures are contractual and representative of exactly what they will get. An hotel website is really about marketing, and in most cases websites do not offer fact sheet like information. Some do, but those are the exception and not the norm.

A solution is to contact the hotel and have them provided fact sheets, actual room floor plans and photographs etc...

I do not like dynamic pricing at all. I understand it at upscale business hotels and four star resorts, but at truely high end hotels I feel rates should at least fluctuate less, if they do at all. At a certain point when one is paying a substantial room rate, having that substantially increase due to occupancy is off putting to guests. Similarly, at least in theory, it would be better to let fewer guests paying the same rate enjoy lower occupancy, than to have rates dynamically drop to fill those last empty rooms.

Fortunately, I have never has a situation in which an hotel has enforced dynamic pricing if I check out early, i.e. try to assess nights already stayed at the current, higher rate instead of what I reserved. It does trouble me that many hotel groups now reserve the right to do so under new policies. In order to protect against this, I actually do regularly truncate stays into separate, consecutive reservations. If I feel my arrival or departure date may change, sometimes I book such that I can cancel a night or two without touching the bulk of the hotel reservation. But, again this is something that a guest of a good hotel should never have to do.