Tschuggen Hotel Group

UX research and UI design for a Swiss luxury hotel group, turning a beautiful but low-converting site into one designed to earn direct bookings.

Tschuggen Hotel Group is a luxury alpine hotel group in Switzerland, led by the Tschuggen Grand Hotel in Arosa. Dorve ran the research and designed the new interface for the group site and its hotels, starting with the Tschuggen Grand Hotel as the template the other properties (Valsana Hotel Arosa, Carlton Hotel St Moritz, Eden Roc Hotel Ascona and the Moving Mountains program) would reuse with their own content. The brief was blunt: the site looked beautiful but produced very little engagement and almost no direct bookings on its own pages.

To find out why, we ran a heuristic analysis and checked every hunch against the site’s own analytics (Universal Analytics, before GA4), reading the real behaviour flow on the German-language version and grounding decisions in Switzerland Tourism data on the luxury traveller. The picture was consistent: most traffic and nearly all conversions were leaving for an external booking page, the homepage had almost no visible content, navigation sat on a single level with no search, the calls to action blended in, and the top products, the packages and spa offers, sat on pages with no traffic. The site had no sales funnel and did not meet WCAG AA. One finding pointed forward more than the rest: the Family and Kids page drew real traffic the structure had almost buried.

From that evidence we designed the new interface. The homepage was rebuilt as a sales and conversion funnel. The navigation was reordered so the most important sections read left to right, moved from one flat level into clear, searchable multi-level silos, with the distractions stripped out. The calls to action were redesigned to stand out and respond, accessibility was brought up to WCAG AA, and the layout made room for SEO content and a news stream, along with the demand the data had exposed. We used object grouping and card sorting to make sure the structure matched how guests actually think, so the design followed the evidence rather than taste.

The Tschuggen Grand Hotel became the working template, and the same design was then rolled out to the other hotels by swapping the content. We saw site traffic rise even while the redesign was still being implemented.

Project info

Requirements

Find out why a visually strong, multilingual site for a luxury hotel group produced almost no on-site engagement or direct bookings, and design a new interface that fixed it. The work had to serve both the group and each hotel, starting with the Tschuggen Grand Hotel as a reusable template.

Strategies & techniques

Heuristic evaluation · Analytics analysis (Universal Analytics behaviour flow) · Audience research (Switzerland Tourism luxury traveller data) · Object grouping and card sorting · Information architecture redesign · Conversion funnel design · UI design · Navigation and interaction design · Accessibility (WCAG AA) · SEO content structure · Reusable page templates

Tools

Discovery: heuristic evaluation of the current site, audience research from Switzerland Tourism data, and an analytics review in Universal Analytics reading behaviour flow, drop-offs and per-page traffic. Structure: object grouping and card sorting turned into new sitemaps and page hierarchies. Design: UI design of a conversion-focused homepage, a reordered multi-level navigation with search, standout calls to action with micro-interactions, and accessible, content-ready templates, starting with the Tschuggen Grand Hotel and rolled out to the other hotels.

Final results

The deliverable was the redesigned interface itself, built directly from the research: a homepage that works as a sales and conversion funnel, a navigation restructured into clear, searchable silos, calls to action that stand out, accessibility brought up to WCAG AA, and content structured for SEO. The Tschuggen Grand Hotel design became the template applied across the group’s other hotels by swapping the content. Site traffic was already rising while the redesign was still being rolled out.