Ace Hotel is a brand that prides itself on being the cultural hub for whichever city it calls home. They have boutique hotels in popular cities across North America, as well as Kyoto, Sydney, and Toronto. Each location is completely unique to the next with a keen focus on what makes the city tick as well as bespoke dining and entertainment/events. The Ace Reader/blog is full of people, events, and ideas that bridge the gap between the physical hotels and online cultural experience. Wallop asked us to partner with them to design a new website with the need for a much improved user experience whilst maintaining a ‘cool’ factor that the brand is known for. Their existing website took a “form over function” approach, which ticked the boxes for the boundaries they were trying to push but ultimately led to poor engagement from website visitors. The redesign needed to do a better job of showcasing the on property events which have become synonymous with Ace Hotel and feature new properties as they expand.

Our designs combine the creatively curious personality of Ace Hotel with user experience best practices. Visually the website complies with the Ace Hotel Global Brand Guidelines, but is flexible enough for each location to have its own content and visual elements. The persistent navigation provides multiple touchpoints for users to easily access other locations and jump into the booking widget. This gave repeat visitors the opportunity to explore locations they may not have previously considered. The events calendar was completely overhauled in a full visual calendars style, including options for users to book their stay based on events happening. The Ace Reader/blog was designed to be very editorial in style, providing the client with multiple different modules to drop into each article to give it a glossy lifestyle appeal.

The team at Wallop looked at data from the two months post launch (September 2021) to the same period two years prior (taking the effects of the pandemic into account for 2020). The new website generated a 59.45% increase in website transactions, a 55.11% increase in website revenue and a 50% increase in e-commerce conversion rate.

See The Work