Good Hotel Guide
A trusted hotel guide whose website had quietly become the main product, running on an infrastructure built to support a book.
The context
The relationship with the Good Hotel Guide started at industry events, between our team and Richard, the guide’s founder, and turned into nearly a decade of work. Over that time the website changed jobs. It began as a companion to the published guide and became the guide’s main commercial platform and content hub.
What was disconnected
The WordPress infrastructure had been chosen for the job the site used to do. It could not hold the scale the guide had reached, and it could not support the workflows that had grown up around it — editors, writers, reviewers and the hotels themselves all needed to contribute, and none of them had a proper way in.
This is the classic hospitality technology trap in a different sector: the stack was quietly setting a ceiling on the commercial strategy, and nobody had called it that.
What we changed
A thorough technical consultancy process came before any build — establishing what the platform actually needed to do commercially, not just what was wrong with the current one.
We then designed and developed a modern static-site web application capable of holding thousands of pages, with a content management system built around the real authoring workflow: editorial, contributed reviews, and hotels managing their own profiles.
Which disciplines were involved
Advisory led the platform decision. Experience designed and built it. Labs continues to explore what else the platform can do commercially now that it can hold the data.
What improved
The guide can scale its property portfolio and its commercial operation without the website being the constraint. Editorial workflows that used to require intervention now run themselves, and the site has moved from supporting the book to driving hotel visibility and direct bookings.
What the work taught
Replatforming is rarely a technology decision. It is a commercial one that happens to be executed in code — and the useful question is never "what is wrong with the current site" but "what is the business unable to do while it exists".
They are strategically strong and very solution-oriented. They have spearheaded numerous projects for us, including thinking about a whole new platform for the website.
Harry in particular is a real partner for us — proactive and strategic at the same time. And he explains complex issues very clearly.
