HotelTonight has one of the smartest logos around. The simple lowercase “h” design also looks like a bed. Pretty clever, right? Well, what’s even more clever is what the company decided to do with the logo in particular.
For the uninitiated, HotelTonight is an app that lets people find last-minute deals on hotel rooms. The catch is that, for the most part, the hotel bookings are non-refundable since they’re on a short-term basis. After the company launched in 2011, about two in every 1,000 customers booked stays by accident. As people started calling the company complaining about accidental bookings, the company had to issue refunds, which, of course, hurt its bottom line. So, to avoid this problem, HotelTonight engineer Ray Lillywhite came up with the solution to make the elongated “h” logo a slide bar that users have to trace their finger along to book a hotel.
Because of this, accidental bookings dropped, and non-completion of the booking process dropped by 75 percent, according to Fast Company Design.
“It impacts the metrics of the business in terms of the results,” HotelTonight CEO Sam Shank told Fast Company Design. “But then there’s the part that’s unmeasurable. That’s about making it memorable and different from what’s out there.”
It’s become so much of the company that it’s new slogan is “three taps and a swipe to book a hotel tonight.”
Now that’s clever.
