Designing a Multi-Hotel Website to Boost Discovery & Profitability

Sonesta Hotels of New York, formerly known as Affinia Hotels, is a collection of four distinctive hotel properties located across prime Manhattan neighborhoods.

Known for their spacious accommodations, local flair, and tailored guest experiences, these hotels cater to both business and leisure travelers seeking comfort with a boutique edge, now under the trusted Sonesta brand umbrella.

As for us, we’re Digital Spice, experts in all things franchise website and online growth, from UX to SEO.

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The previous Affinia.com experience had reach, but it lacked cohesion:

• Disjointed Navigation: While each of the four Manhattan hotels was accessible from the homepage, once inside a property, users found themselves locked in a labyrinth of property-specific menus, often with no clear route back to the broader portfolio.
• Bloated Content Footprint: With nearly 400 URLs, the site was weighed down by thin content, duplicate assets, zombie pages (generating zero traffic), and orphaned content that was virtually invisible to both users and search engines.
• Meta Mayhem: Title tags and meta descriptions were poorly aligned to page content, with many exceeding best-practice limits or mismatching user intent.
• Brand Drift: The Affinia-to-Sonesta transition left a trail of outdated property names and visual inconsistencies that diluted trust and impacted recognition.
• Performance Pressure: Despite its shortcomings, Affinia.com delivered a substantial portion of hotel revenue, making the stakes for traffic retention particularly high.
• Compliance Shortcomings: The site’s accessibility and compliance score hovered in the 60s (out of 100), based on Sonesta’s internal benchmarks. This meant some users faced barriers to access, and the brand was exposed to potential legal and reputational risk.

This wasn’t just a redesign, it was a root-and-stem reinvention grounded in SEO precision and UX intelligence:

• Strategic Content Restructuring: We audited the entire site, pruning deadweight pages and nesting valuable orphan content under a logical, scalable URL hierarchy. Interlinking was applied meticulously to foster discoverability and support search indexing.
• Navigation That Flows: We implemented user-tested UX pathways with consistent top-level navigation and smart CTAs to guide users across properties without disorientation.
• Rich Menu Dropdowns: We created visually and content-rich menu drop-downs to allow users to compare and contrast properties with a simple hover.
• SEO-Friendly “Common Areas”: We introduced 5 pages under the main navigation to target different audience segments (business travelers, vacationers, extended stays, event planners) to the property that best matches their needs.
• SEO Best Practices at Every Layer: Meta details were rewritten for relevance and performance. Pages were streamlined for crawlability, while accessibility and ADA compliance were prioritized to ensure broad usability.
• Brand Alignment & Trust Signals: All visual elements and copy were unified under the Sonesta brand umbrella. Key landing pages featured site-wide ribbons and a dedicated content piece to orient returning visitors and preserve search equity.

With the new site live in March 2025, measurable gains began showing within weeks. By May:

• Total Website Traffic: +143.7% YoY
• Organic Traffic: +41.2% YoY
• Availability Check Rate: +84.7% YoY
• Room Revenue: +11.1% YoY
• Accessibility & Compliance: Score improved from the low 60s into the green zone (80–100), ensuring a more inclusive experience while reducing exposure to compliance risks.

While the domain migration to Sonesta.com (Domain Authority: 79) provided a slight organic edge, the most significant impact came from eliminating content rot, enhancing UX flows, and aligning structural elements with SEO principles.

This was a textbook case of engagement metrics driving rankings, and rankings driving revenue.

This project proves what we preach: UX and SEO aren’t parallel tracks, they’re intertwined ingredients in a high-conversion recipe.

But what truly positioned this project for success was the close collaboration with the client. Their deep knowledge of the properties, commitment to brand integrity, and willingness to partner with us every step of the way ensured that this wasn’t just a redesign—it was a reinvention.

Together, we didn’t just preserve performance, but we reimagined it, blending user-centric design with search strategy to deliver a seamless, revenue-driving experience.

In our client’s words:

“Thank you all for a successful launch! I truly appreciate your team’s dedication and A LOT of time in making this a seamless transition. Look forward to continuing this journey with you all.” – Claudia