From Looking to Booking: The Relationship of Hotel Website Aesthetics, Hotel Features and Direct Booking

The hotel industry is highly competitive, with hotels seeking new ways to increase market share and boost direct bookings against the dominance of online travel agencies. While previous research has established that hotel website quality influences booking behavior, the role of website aesthetics, specifically dimensions such as photography, design, and text, has remained insufficiently theorized and tested. This paper addresses that gap by proposing and testing a model that is theoretically grounded by integrating the stimulus–organism–response framework, the elaboration likelihood model, and signaling theory to explain how website aesthetic dimensions relate to hotel features and direct booking share. This study employs a content analysis of 201 categorized Croatian hotel websites combined with chi-square analysis and Cramer’s V effect-size estimation. The findings confirm significant associations between hotel features (rating, chain, and consortia membership) and website aesthetic dimensions and between aesthetic dimensions and direct booking share, with photography and text showing the strongest associations within the sample. These results extend our theoretical understanding of website aesthetics as an antecedent of booking behavior and offer hoteliers evidence to prioritize content investment. This study also addresses methodological concerns by reporting effect sizes alongside significance levels and a structured coding protocol. Future research should explore the directionality of these relationships, which is identified as a limitation of this study. This study is deliberately scoped to the aesthetic dimension of hotel websites within the Croatian market; broader website-quality characteristics (e.g., navigation, usability, booking-interface design, page-load speed) and more recent, post-pandemic data are identified as important directions for future research.