SS Rotterdam

The problem

The ss Rotterdam is the former flagship of the Holland America Line, moored in Rotterdam as a hotel with restaurants, meeting rooms, event spaces and guided tours. That brings very different visitors to one site: someone booking a night, a company looking for a conference room, a couple planning a wedding. All of them had to find their way from one menu. DBK made the concept.

Approach

I designed the site and built the front-end with Bootstrap. The main menu follows what the ship offers: hotel, restaurants, meetings and events, parties and weddings, tours and discover the ship. A yellow booking block with arrival, departure, guests and rooms sits on every page, with shortcuts below it to hire a venue, reserve a table or buy tour tickets. The venue overview can be filtered by capacity, from 5 up to 3,500 people, and by setup, such as theatre, classroom or banquet. Hotel room pages list the other room types in the sidebar with a price and a reserve link.

Outcome

Yellow, dark grey and white run through every page, and a thin double line marks each heading. The homepage ends with news, a map with a route planner and an agenda, laid over a faint outline of the ship seen from above.

What changed

• One booking block on every page, with shortcuts for venues, tables and tours.
• A venue overview filtered by capacity and setup.
• Room pages with the other room types and prices alongside.
• A homepage with news, map, route planner and agenda.