I flew out to Austin in December to help with this little show we put together. These guys put on a great live set and they were very cool hanging out for a few hours after the show with their fans. Check out the video below we put together for the event:
If you get a chance to visit Austin, Momo’s was a great bar too. The staff there was excellent if you need to throw an event or just want to go catch a band play.
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I travel a lot. I have learned to love hotels. Especially really nice hotels. So when I read an article by on the eConsultancy website explaining that the Four Seasons Luxury hotel chain had just launched a new mobile friendly upgraded website. I had to check it out. Hotel websites, like restaurants and luxury brands seem stuck creating awful web experiences and according to the article from eConsultancy they wanted to improve the percentage of bookings that occurred from the 30 million annual visits.
The site does have some nice features and the booking process is up front and center, but I was a little shocked when I visited the site. I would have called this site slick about five years ago, but it doesn’t even compare to the travel site Jetsetter, and there are lots of technical and content issues with the site.
I thought I would share with you, some of what they got for their 18 million:
Forget being found
Probably the first thing I noticed when I went to the website was a strange redirect. I typed in the URL www.fourseasons.com and was redirected via a 302 redirect to the development or staging server www.preview.fourseasons.com. As you wander the site you find lots of strange redirects all using the 302 rather than a 301 redirect. I found some terrible search issues my favorite was this in the robots.txt file:
############################ # DO NOT REMOVE THIS FILE # ############################ # this file tells all robots they are not allowed to crawl any part of the site # It is served instead of robots.txt on servers that are not PRIMARY # only the live production server is PRIMARY #
User-agent: facebookexternalhit
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Yes, it is true that they launched the new site, blocking the site to web crawlers. When they see the traffic from search engines die over the next few weeks I wonder if they wil be surprised.
It’s buggy
At the time I checked it, this site didn’t look like it was ready for prime time. The big win was supposed to be the mobile experience, but on both my iPad and my iPhone the site would jump from the mobile experience to their full site. The full site is not even slightly friendly on the phone this was supposed to be the big win, but it appears that it inconsistently seems aware of my user agent.
Check out a couple of shots: 
It’s slow 
Most travel sites have big beautiful photography, and this can bog down a site, but from a quick glance it looks like the site is using a CDN to cache and improve performance. SO why is it so slow. Images on my very fast internet connection took forever to load and when they did they rotated so fast they were making me ill. When I look at Jetsetter they have similarly large images but the template loads quickly. And when I did look at the reservations tool the available rooms pages took just as long as other pages to load.
Am I wrong?
Maybe I am being unfair, the site was just launched, but when I hear a brand rebuilt their site from the ground up for 18 million dollars I am expecting a site worthy of sharing. Instead, I see a site that doesn’t even really have the attention to detail that I would expect from a brand like the Four Seasons. I can imagine how a lot of the problems were introduced…
But quite frankly, I am shocked by the sticker price, with that kinda number you expect a site that really pushes the boundaries and functions well. It just seems like a hot mess. I feel like I am working in the wrong industry at the moment, because if I had 18 million you wouldn’t find simple bugs on launch day let alone major issues. Perhaps a few of us should create an agency that caters to companies with unbelievable budgets and low-expectations.
Getting it right is really hard and it is clear that budget is not a guarantee to deliver a great experience for your brand. It just feels like they missed the mark and all the bugs are hard to overlook.
UPDATE: In case some on from Four Seasons sees this and wants to reach out I made a list of other issues that people have sent me that they found, including some security vulnerabilities that are real issues. You can use my contact form and I will send my list.
UPDATE #2: It appears they fixed a bunch of the deployment issues I found and they are no longer redirecting to the staging domain. I did check and it looked like they were loosing some URLs in the search engines. There are still a lot of issues. Its tough to watch.
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