When a business grows from startup into a real market competitor, its brand mission and identity are challenged. We came alongside Hotel Tonight at a pivotal point in their growth and delivered a design direction and content strategy that expanded their web presence, improved engagement, and increased app downloads without losing the integrity of the vision that drove their success from the beginning.
Founded in 2010, Hotel Tonight is the premiere mobile solution for last-minute, same-day hotel reservations. Hotel Tonight was acquired in March of 2019 by AirBnB as part of the company’s efforts to become an end-to-end travel platform.
Their objective was clear: Get more people to download the Hotel Tonight mobile app and clearly communicate what it does and how it works.
The Hotel Tonight app was performing well, so they came to us to help strengthen their presence and accessibility on the web. While preparing to expand into a competitive market and extend their offering beyond a 7-day advance hotel reservation, they wanted to ensure they didn’t compromise the originality of their brand and message.
Hotel Tonight’s primary focus was to redesign the landing page with an aesthetic that would be applied across the entire site. Collaborating with their marketing team & internal stakeholders, we streamlined and restructured the narrative flow of the web experience, and created a content strategy that incentivizing exploration.
Hotel Tonight wanted a design refresh that embodied the uniqueness of their values, but we needed it to work with our refined structure and flow of their site. Our goal was to make sure information was conveyed in the best possible way to the user, but approached with an openness to explore ways in which a brand identity can bend and flex to occupy new space.
We carried this theme to photography to create a vibe that conveyed a kinetic, spontaneous urban energy through natural, warmer tones, both fresh and vintage at once.
We enhanced the impact and appeal of their brand by expanding their color palette, leveraging their primary brand colors and introducing a gradient color to symbolize the passing of day to night in order to connote spontaneity.
Our success in evolving the brand was due to a collective dedication to maintaining brand integrity, and Hotel Tonight’s ability to experiment without losing their cool.
The finished work breathed new life into their site, with bolder tones and images that used movement to capture an ambitious sense of adventure. These enhancements complemented their fun, energetic brand voice and expanded their target audience appeal.
