The Grand America in Salt Lake City is an amazing hotel. It stands out in both structure, amenities and service. The hotel truly is grand, hearkening back to yesteryear when gentlemen wore top hats and ladies wore ball gowns. My company has had banquets at the Grand Hotel and we were very impressed with every aspect of the hotel.

While there are many sites that talk about the hotel in terms of its amenities we at Half Nut choose to focus more on how they present themselves to the world via the World Wide Web. Our job is to review their site and help them find places they can improve. Our reviews are never meant to degrade but only serve as a resource to make travel better for all.
The Grand Hotel’s web presence at times is very grand and at other times seems a bit less.

A quick search on Google provides the first hit which takes you right to their highly functional web booking engine. Although it is Flash based and a little tightly packed a common user should be able to make a booking without too many problems.
Going directly to the booking engine seemed a bit awkward at first as I was expecting a front-page. However this seems right on target as people most likely are searching for a place to make reservations. So while it was a bit unexpected, it made making a booking very easy. No hunting and pecking to find the booking engine to make a reservation.

The second link on Google was a more traditional link that took me to a clean and conventional web site where I could make a booking or find out a bit more about the hotel. Kudos goes to the site for showing pictures of each room instead of a single image for all rooms. However I was unable to easily find a photo gallery which is one of the large factors for wanting to stay in the first place. We want to see lavish photos of this elegantly appointed hotel. A picture truly is worth a thousand words and could help this grand hotel say a lot.

I must say that the initial video on the more traditional link from Google was a bit disheartening as that is all that showed on the front page. Certainly it could have been worked into the main page rather than having a oddly and disconnected video all by itself.

It doesn’t appear as the hotel is marketed much on the internet as the Google Page Rank is non-existent and there are few links and images pointing to the site.

As for the inside of the page, the code makes use of deprecated tags and is somewhat bloated. The overall structure of the page however makes it fairly fast loading. It produced 30 errors on the main page, but validates in the CSS department. It struggles a bit with accessibility as there were 2 errors and 15 warnings on the home page. Overall I would give the site a B on the front-end and a C on the back end. From such a grand hotel I would expect a little grander web site.

While the Grand Hotel is an impeccable establishment that my family and friends have enjoyed staying at their site does need a little house cleaning.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 9:50 am and is filed under Accessibility, CSS, Design, HTML, Hotels, Reviews, SEO, Standards, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.