The Marisol

A 14-room hotel that people already love.

The Marisol is the kind of place you'd screenshot — a small hotel just off South Congress, good morning light, a planted courtyard, locally-roasted coffee in the lobby. The guests are weekenders from Dallas and Houston, design-minded travelers doing SoCo and the food trucks, and the occasional wedding block.

People choose it on feel and reviews. Word of mouth is strong. The product is genuinely good — which is exactly why the website was so frustrating.

A gorgeous slideshow that booked almost nothing.

The old site was a full-screen photo slideshow with the personality of a screensaver. No obvious way to check availability. Rates were buried two clicks deep. The reviews — their best asset — lived on a separate page nobody visited. And on a phone, the booking widget half-loaded and then gave up.

So guests did the rational thing: they found The Marisol on Instagram, then booked through Expedia or Booking.com because it was easier. Every one of those reservations quietly skimmed 15–20% off the top — and the hotel never got the guest's email.

One scroll. One obvious thing to do.

I cut the slideshow and built the homepage around a single job: book direct.

• Put a sticky "Check availability" up top that actually works on a phone.
• Rewrote the page around the three real reasons people pick them — the location, the light, the courtyard breakfast.
• Pulled their best reviews and a real guest photo to the very top.
• Made the book-direct perk — free late checkout — impossible to miss.

No discovery phase, no 40-page strategy doc. Just the homepage, the booking path, and the words, fixed.