Cedar & Stone Lodge

A small lodge pays a platform commission on every booking that does not come to it directly. Guests go to the platforms because the platforms answer their questions: the full price, the cancellation terms, what the room is like. The rebuild set out to answer all of those on the lodge's own site, so booking direct becomes the easier choice rather than the loyal one.

The booking request is the centre of it. A guest chooses dates, a room and how many are coming, and sees the price for the stay with the GST, PST and municipal and regional district tax set out line by line. It takes four steps, and the request goes to the hosts rather than to a third party. The homepage says up front that every room's full price, taxes included, is on the next page.

Each room answers the questions a guest would otherwise email about. The five room pages give the bed, the view and the starting rate, and a Good to know block covers how many stairs there are, the check-in window and the cancellation terms. The Moonlit Ridge Suite, for example, says it is one flight of 14 steps with a handrail. The questions page draws from the same policies file, so no answer contradicts another.

The site sells the stay as well as the room. The hero opens on the lodge with today's date, sunrise and sunset, and a day at the lodge runs down the homepage from arrival to breakfast to a morning at the hot pools. Every fact about Radium, from the pools to Kootenay National Park, traces to Parks Canada or the provincial government, and fifteen journal guides meet travellers while they plan.

The rebuild was checked the way a guest would use it. An automated accessibility scan reads zero violations on all 32 pages at phone and desktop widths, and text on the textured bands was pixel-checked for contrast. The phone menu now opens in about a tenth of a second. The contact map loads only when someone asks for it, and a privacy page says what the site collects.

For a real lodge, inn or cabin rental, the same build runs on its own rooms, rates and house rules, with the booking request wired to the reservation system it already uses. The Good to know blocks become the questions its hosts answer by email every week.