What we changed first when a booking path was losing guests

This is the least glamorous kind of project and usually the most valuable: a property with a decent site, good photography and a booking engine that loses people.

The instinct is to redesign. We spent the first week counting instead.

We put a single question in front of the whole path: at which step do people stop? Not 'is the design good' but 'where does the number drop'.

Three answers came back, in order of size.

The first was the calendar. The site said availability from a certain date; the engine showed a different calendar with different minimum-stay rules. A guest who had already chosen the property was being told two different things before they had entered a single detail.

Where the guests actually went

• Site calendar and engine calendar disagreed on minimum stay
• The redirect changed domain, photography and type — it read as a different company
• The price shown at step one excluded tax; the price at the final screen included it

Nothing was added in the first pass. Three things came out.

The domain change. The engine stayed, but it was put behind a path on the property's own domain so the guest never saw the address bar change.

The second calendar. The site stopped showing its own availability and showed the engine's, so the two could not disagree.

The price step that surprised people. The rate shown at the start became the rate at the end, with tax stated where it was first mentioned.

What we removed

Every one of those was a subtraction. None of them was a redesign.

The homepage. The photography. The tone of voice. All of it was working, and rebuilding it would have consumed the budget that the path needed.

This is the part that is hardest to sell, because a redesign is visible and a booking path fix is not. The property had to accept that the site would look identical on the day it started working better.

We said so in the first week, before any work started, so it was never a surprise at handover.

What we deliberately left alone

Drop-off between the availability check and the confirmation fell, and the property stopped receiving calls asking whether the price included tax — a question that had been arriving several times a day.

The commercial figures are the property's to publish, not ours. What we can say is that the work took three weeks and touched none of the pages a guest would describe if you asked them what the site looks like.

What changed

If a business is losing money at a step, fix the step before redesigning the thing around it. A redesign is easier to brief, easier to photograph and easier to show a board — which is exactly why it gets chosen over the unglamorous alternative that would have worked.

The general lesson