HGP Hospitality Research
Researching the Digital Guest Decision
An ongoing study of hospitality website experience, information architecture and guest decision architecture
A hotel website does more than introduce a property.
For a prospective guest, it becomes part of the decision-making environment — a place to understand the destination, discover the experience, evaluate accommodation, understand logistics, compare options, establish trust and eventually decide whether to proceed.
But there is an important distinction between information being available and information being usable when the decision requires it.
This is the question behind Hospitality Growth Partners' ongoing research.
We examine how hospitality websites present, connect, place and sequence the information that prospective guests need as they move towards a booking decision.
This is not a hotel ranking exercise.
It is not a review of physical hotel operations.
It is an ongoing examination of the digital guest decision environment.
Why We Started the Research
Our research began with a simple question:
Does having the right information on a hotel website necessarily mean that the guest can use it effectively to make a decision?
The answer proved more complex than expected.
Information could exist somewhere on the official website and still be difficult to evaluate because it was fragmented, separated from related information, disclosed later in the journey, difficult to compare or presented in a format requiring additional interpretation.
That observation became the foundation for the HGP research programme.
As the research expanded, the question evolved from:
Is the information there?
to:
Can the guest find, connect, understand, compare and use the information at the moment it matters?
From Information Architecture to Decision Architecture
Traditional website analysis tends to focus on information architecture:
Where is the information?
HGP's research goes one step further:
How does that information support the guest's decision?
We call this Decision Architecture.
Decision Architecture considers the relationship between:
Information → Connection → Placement → Sequence → Comparison → Confidence
A transfer detail buried in a document may technically exist.
A room feature may exist on one page while the information required to compare it with another room exists somewhere else.
A direct-booking benefit may be communicated prominently but separated from the moment when rates are being evaluated.
Trust evidence may be available on the website but positioned away from the point at which the guest is considering booking.
The research therefore examines not simply whether information exists, but how the digital environment helps or makes more difficult the process of making a decision.
How the Research Has Evolved
The HGP research is deliberately cumulative.
Each expansion has allowed us to test earlier observations, refine definitions, identify new patterns and strengthen the methodology.
The journey has progressed through four major research stages.
01 — The Beginning
14-Property Research
Information Architecture vs Decision Architecture
The first research stage established the foundation of the HGP methodology.
Across the initial 14 properties, we began examining the difference between a website that contains information
and a website that helps a guest make a decision.
This research introduced the early HGP thinking around:
- information availability,
- decision-making requirements,
- luxury hospitality storytelling,
- functional clarity,
- direct-booking communication,
- accommodation evaluation,
- arrival information,
- and the relationship between emotional desire and practical decision information.
It was the starting point for what became a much larger research programme.
The question that emerged:
If luxury hospitality websites are exceptionally good at creating desire, are they equally effective at providing the information required to act on that desire?
READ INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE VS DECISION ARCHITECTURE
02 — The Research Expands
21-Property Research
The Confidence Gap
As the research expanded, an important pattern became clearer.
The problem was not always missing information.
Sometimes the information existed but appeared at the wrong moment, in the wrong place, or disconnected from the decision it was supposed to support.
This led to the concept of the:
Confidence Gap
The gap between having access to information and having enough connected, timely and usable information to make a confident decision.
The 21-property study developed the research beyond individual website observations and strengthened the examination of:
- information placement,
- decision timing,
- accommodation evaluation,
- trust,
- arrival and logistics,
- direct-booking communication,
- and the relationship between storytelling and functional clarity.
The question that emerged:
What happens when the right information exists, but the guest encounters it at the wrong point in the decision journey?
03 — The Research Deepens
30-Property Research
The Connection Gap
The next stage revealed another important distinction.
Information does not have to be missing to become difficult to use.
It can exist across the official domain while requiring the prospective guest to connect it manually across multiple website locations.
This led to the formalisation of the:
Connection Gap
The 30-property research examined how decision-critical information can become fragmented across a website and how the relationship between individual pieces of information can be just as important as the information itself.
The research methodology became increasingly focused on:
- information relationships,
- accommodation comparison,
- direct-booking communication,
- trust placement,
- information consistency,
- decision sequencing,
- and the distinction between information availability and information usability.
The question that emerged:
If the information exists, but the guest has to reconstruct the decision themselves, where does the real information problem lie?
04 — The Current Research
40-Property Research
The Decision Friction Gap
What a 40-Property Audit Reveals About Information, Placement and Guest Decision Architecture
The 40-property study represents the current stage of the HGP research programme.
At this stage, the research moved beyond examining individual information problems and developed a broader framework for understanding decision friction across the hospitality website experience.
The research examines how information can become difficult to use because it is:
missing, fragmented, delayed, inconsistently presented, difficult to compare, or separated from the decision it supports.
The methodology also formalised four primary diagnostic categories:
- Content Gap
- Connection Gap
- Placement Gap
- Consistency Gap
The study deliberately separates:
what was observed,
from
what those observations may mean,
and from
what would require future behavioural or commercial testing.
The result is the most developed stage of the HGP research methodology to date.
The central question:
What happens when a website contains much of the information a guest needs, yet the digital environment still creates additional work before that guest can make a confident decision?
The HGP Research Methodology
Although the research has evolved, its underlying methodology remains consistent.
1. Start With the Official Digital Experience
Research begins with the property's official website and, where relevant, its associated booking journey.
The objective is to understand the digital environment available to a prospective guest rather than relying solely on third-party descriptions.
2. Follow the Guest Decision Journey
We examine the website from the perspective of a prospective high-value guest.
The research considers how the guest progressively attempts to understand:
Discover → Understand → Evaluate → Compare → Trust → Validate → Book
The precise journey differs between properties.
We therefore record the journey presented by the website rather than imposing a theoretical ideal journey on every property.
3. Examine Information Beyond Presence
The research does not stop at asking whether information exists.
We examine:
- Where it appears
- When it appears
- How it connects with related information
- Whether alternatives can be compared
- Whether important information is separated from the decision it supports
- How information is presented
- Whether the website communicates consistently
- What additional synthesis the prospective guest must perform
This is the foundation of HGP's Decision Architecture approach.
The HGP Analytical Framework
The underlying HGP framework provides the analytical structure behind the research and Website Experience Reviews.
It examines areas including:
- first impression and positioning,
- brand storytelling,
- destination communication,
- accommodation discovery,
- accommodation differentiation,
- accommodation comparison,
- arrival and logistics,
- direct-booking communication,
- trust,
- practical guest information,
- booking journey,
- information placement,
- information consistency,
- decision sequencing,
- structural information formats,
- and conversion opportunities.
The framework is the analytical skeleton.
The published research focuses on the patterns and insights that emerge from applying it.
Four Core Diagnostic Categories
As the research matured, HGP established four primary diagnostic categories.
Content Gap
Required decision information is entirely absent from the official domain.
Connection Gap
Required decision information exists on the official domain but requires manual synthesis across three or more distinct URL paths.
Placement Gap
Required decision information exists on the official domain but surfaces only after the guest enters the CRS or booking-engine commitment phase.
Consistency Gap
Operationally incompatible claims exist on the official domain under the same property, scope and time conditions.
These categories are deliberately kept distinct.
A Connection Gap is not a Placement Gap.
The research also avoids replacing these operational definitions with subjective labels such as "poor navigation" or "confusing website."
Observation, Interpretation and Hypothesis
A key principle of the HGP methodology is the separation of evidence from interpretation.
Level 1 — Observation
What the research directly identified on the website.
Level 2 — Interpretation
What that structural observation means within the context of digital decision architecture.
Level 3 — Hypothesis
A possible consequence that requires future empirical testing.
This distinction is important because the research does not measure guest behaviour or commercial performance.
Where a potential relationship with conversion, booking behaviour or commercial outcomes is discussed,
it remains a hypothesis rather than a measured result.
What the Research Does Not Measure
The HGP research is specifically concerned with the digital information environment.
It does not claim to measure:
- hotel service quality,
- physical property quality,
- guest satisfaction,
- guest preference,
- conversion rate,
- booking abandonment,
- revenue,
- ADR,
- direct-booking share,
- OTA switching behaviour,
- or financial impact.
The research therefore remains focused on digital information architecture and guest decision architecture.
Why the Research Continues
The objective is not simply to reach a particular number of properties.
Each expansion provides an opportunity to:
observe → compare → challenge → refine → verify → synthesise
The progression from the initial 14 properties to 21, 30 and now 40 has allowed HGP to move from individual website observations towards a more structured understanding of hospitality website decision architecture.
And the research remains ongoing.
Future research stages may expand the corpus, test specific dimensions in greater depth, introduce new comparisons or challenge conclusions drawn from earlier stages.
The methodology will evolve where the evidence requires it.
The principle will remain the same:
Research first. Verify the evidence. Challenge the conclusion. Separate observation from interpretation. Lock the findings. Then publish.
Research → Reviews → Practice
The HGP research programme connects directly with the HGP Website Experience Review Series.
The two are deliberately different.
Research identifies patterns across a growing corpus.
Website Experience Reviews examine those patterns within individual property websites.
The research provides the broader perspective.
The reviews bring that perspective back to the individual guest journey.
Together, they form the foundation of HGP's approach to hospitality website experience, guest decision psychology and direct-booking content strategy.
An Ongoing Research Programme
The HGP research will continue to expand.
As additional properties are studied, this page will become the permanent record of the research journey — documenting how the questions evolved, how the methodology developed and what each successive research stage revealed.
14 → 21 → 30 → 40 → …
The number will change.
The question remains:
How effectively does a hospitality website help a prospective guest move from desire to decision?
