Projects Rodos Backpackers
A website with the energy of a hostel in Rhodes.
Rodos Backpackers is a family-run boutique hostel with apartments on the island of Rhodes, Greece. We redesigned its website with video, reels, a gallery, direct booking and seven languages.
- Client
- Rodos Backpackers Boutique Hostel & Apartments
- Industry
- Boutique hostel and apartments in Rhodes, Greece
- What we did
- Development, seven languages, direct booking and go-live
The context
Rodos Backpackers is a family-run hostel and guest house, 8 minutes from the Old Town of Rhodes. It offers shared and private rooms, four apartments, a bar serving breakfast and a zen garden. It is one of our clients in Europe.
Travellers usually choose where to stay from their phones: they look at photos, read reviews and compare prices across several platforms. The hostel’s own website is where it can show itself as it really is and receive direct bookings.
The challenge
The previous website was built on WordPress. Reviewing it, we found four issues to resolve.
- An outdated design. The look had aged and did not convey what it is like to stay at the hostel.
- A slow website. Pages were slow to load, which matters even more on mobile, where people search for accommodation.
- No identity of its own. Nothing in the design set Rodos Backpackers apart from other accommodation on the island.
- An unclear message. The website did not speak directly to its audience: backpackers, groups of friends and travellers who work remotely.
How can a website convey the atmosphere of a hostel so that someone who has never been to Rhodes books directly with it?
The decisions
Before designing, we defined what a traveller should feel and do on arrival.
Video first
The hero section and the reels show real scenes from the hostel, filmed by guests and by the team.
A colour for each audience
Gold accompanies the hostel and its social life. Aegean blue accompanies the apartments, designed for rest.
Booking always within reach
The booking button sits in the menu, in the hero section and at the bottom of the page, and opens the hostel’s booking engine with the chosen dates.
The website in motion.
A tour of the home page on a desktop screen.
What we did, section by section.
A hero section that feels like arriving
The home page opens with a full-screen video of the hostel. Above it runs a slanted ribbon listing what it offers: dorms, private rooms, apartments, the Old Town and the zen garden.
In the bottom right corner, a rotating badge reading ‘Best price, book direct’ leads straight to the booking engine. Further down, five reasons to choose the hostel, from Wi-Fi for digital nomads to daytime and night-time activities.
Reels, just like Instagram
A carousel shows six reels from the @rodosbackpackers account, with their view counts: excursions, beaches, boat trips, food, nights out and sunsets. They play automatically without sound, and hearts appear on hover.
The original videos weighed 65 MB. We compressed them to under 6 MB in total, so the carousel loads quickly on mobile data too.
Reviews in plain sight
Before booking direct, travellers want to know what other guests think. The website shows the ratings from the four platforms where the hostel has reviews: Hostelworld, Booking.com, Tripadvisor and Google.
Gallery and apartments
The hostel gallery can be browsed by dragging, and each photo opens in a full-screen viewer. It shows the courtyard, the bar and the rooms.
The four apartments, Zeus, Gaia, Penelope and Aphrodite’s, appear as stacks of Polaroid photos. On hover the photos fan out, and a click opens the full gallery for each one, with 37 photos in total.
Direct booking
At the bottom of the home page, a search form asks for the arrival date, the departure date and the number of guests. On confirming, it opens Beds24, the hostel’s booking engine, with the search already filled in.
Travellers see real availability without retyping their details, and the hostel receives the booking without intermediaries such as Booking.com or Hostelworld.
Seven languages
The website is available in English, Spanish, Italian, German, Finnish, Greek and Russian. Each language has its own address, and Google shows each person the version in their language.
If the visitor’s browser is set to another language on the list, a notice offers to switch. If they decline, the website does not ask again.
Designed for mobile
On a phone, the reels swipe with a finger just like Instagram, and the apartments stack one below another. The booking search spans the full width, with large buttons for choosing dates and guests.
The stack
We built the website with Next.js and React, in TypeScript, styled with Tailwind CSS. Animations use Framer Motion, smooth scrolling uses Lenis and languages are handled with next-intl. The Montserrat typeface is hosted on the server itself.
The website runs on the hostel’s own server. Nginx serves images and videos straight from disk, and Node.js, managed by PM2, renders the pages.
- Next.js
- React
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- Node.js
- Nginx
- Framer Motion
- Lenis
- next-intl
- Beds24
- PM2
100 in Lighthouse, across all four categories
Lighthouse is Google’s tool for measuring the technical quality of a website. Rodos Backpackers scored 100 in Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO, even with video in the hero section and six reels on the home page.
We achieved it with WebP images, compressed videos, static files served by Nginx and pages that Next.js generates in advance for each language.
Lighthouse backpackers.com.gr
Ready for Google
Every page includes the hostel’s details (name, address and phone number) in the format search engines read, and the sitemap lists the versions in each language.
The same addresses
The previous website’s privacy policy redirects to the new one, so that links already in circulation are not lost.
Results
This case study does not yet include booking data. We will add it once the hostel shares it.
What we learned
- In tourism, video sells the place. Real scenes filmed by guests convey the hostel’s atmosphere better than any description.
- Reviews on other sites build trust in your own. Seeing the ratings from Hostelworld, Booking.com, Tripadvisor and Google gives travellers the proof they look for before booking direct.
- A video-rich website can still be fast. Compressing each reel and serving static files from Nginx keeps the page light.
- Every traveller reads better in their own language. With seven languages and a browser-based notice, every visitor finds their version from the very first page.
