Case study · a hotel in Punjab

A hotel where most bookings still start with a phone call.

Twenty-five rooms, eight named spaces, more than 1,550 Google reviews, and an old website that showed almost none of it. The new site gives every guest three ways to book direct, and sends nobody to a booking site.

Live now: thegrandambassador.com

The Grand Ambassador’s website on a phone: the hotel’s reception, “Live like an Ambassador.” and a box to check availability — In the pictures: the hotel’s home page on a phone: the first screen, and further down, at the rooms, with the same three buttons.

Further down the same page on a phone: the Twin Room, with the same Call, WhatsApp and Book bar along the bottom — In the pictures: the hotel’s home page on a phone: the first screen, and further down, at the rooms, with the same three buttons.

At a glance · checked on 27 September 2026

Two minutes from the platform, better known to past guests.

Client: The Grand Ambassador
The business: A 25-room hotel on Railway Road, Phagwara, Punjab
Who it serves: Guests who call or WhatsApp before they book, often family abroad
Pages: Fourteen, written and custom-coded
Guests can: Check availability, ask about a room on WhatsApp, call the front desk: all direct
Live now: thegrandambassador.com. The build is credited in its footer.
Worth knowing: The hotel is in Phagwara, where GrowMint works. It was an Indian project, priced in rupees. Amulya Vashistha, who photographed the hotel, works with Aditya at GrowMint, and GrowMint also does the hotel’s photo, film and social media every month: see that work.

The Grand Ambassador sits 130 metres from Phagwara Junction, close enough to walk with luggage. Inside it there is a restaurant, a bar, a rooftop terrace and two banquet halls, three room types, and a reputation built over years of people arriving off trains.

Almost every enquiry arrived as a phone call or a WhatsApp message. A good share came from families abroad: a son in Canada booking a room in Punjab for his parents, paying from one country for a stay in another. So the site gives a guest three ways to book direct, and sends nobody to a booking site: call the front desk, one tap from any page; WhatsApp the hotel, with the room already written in; or book on the hotel’s own booking page, with the dates carried across.

The phone call is not friction to be removed. It is how this hotel sells.

The decisions

Five choices, and what each one cost.

Each one is on the hotel’s live pages.

1 of 5

Every room enquiry opens WhatsApp with the message already started.

The room is written in, with a line for dates and a line for guests. The guest fills in two blanks and presses send.

In Punjab, WhatsApp is not a fallback channel. It is the channel. For a son in Canada booking for his parents, a written message he can forward is worth more than a form he has to describe afterwards. The front desk receives a structured enquiry instead of a bare question about rooms.

A function works the same way: its message asks for the date, the number of guests, and veg or non-veg.

What it costThe hotel gives up the tidy analytics a form would have produced. It gains enquiries that can be answered in one reply.

The Twin Room’s card on the hotel’s home page: two single beds, For families and colleagues travelling together, and the buttons Enquire, Book and View room. — In the pictures: the Twin Room on the home page. Photograph by Amulya Vashistha.

Hello — I would like to ask about the Twin Room at The Grand Ambassador.Dates:Guests:To the front desk, ready to send: two blanks to fill, then send.

2 of 5

Guest reviews quoted in full, beside the rating rather than instead of it.

More than 1,550 people have reviewed this hotel on Google. A rating on its own throws most of that away, so the site shows the 4.3 and then quotes guests in full, in their own words.

A star rating is a number a stranger has no reason to trust. A paragraph in a guest’s own words, about the specific thing they noticed, is evidence. Nobody fakes the boring details.

What it costA great deal more vertical space, and the discipline not to edit the quotes into something neater.

The hotel’s Guest voices: 4.3 from more than 1,550 Google reviews, then one guest’s review in full. — In the pictures: the home page, ‘Guest voices’. The rating links to the hotel’s Google reviews.

3 of 5

Real distances, including the inconvenient one.

Walk to the station: 2 minutes. Walk to the bus stand: 8 minutes. By road to the university: 12 minutes. Adampur, the nearest airport: 27 km.

These are the first four questions a guest asks, and a hotel site that answers them honestly, including the airport that is not close, buys credibility for everything else on the page. Amritsar’s international airport is about two and a half hours by road, and the site says so.

What it costAdmitting the airport is a drive. It was never a secret; guests find out.

The hotel’s contact page, Getting here: Phagwara Junction railway station, 130 m, a 2-minute walk; the bus stand, about 550 m, an 8-minute walk; Lovely Professional University, 8.3 km, about 12 minutes by road; Adampur Airport, about 27 km. Measured on Google Maps, August 2026. — In the pictures: the contact page, ‘Getting here’.

4 of 5

Call, WhatsApp and Book fixed where the thumb is.

On a phone, the three ways to book direct stay pinned to the bottom of the screen on every page, at every scroll position.

The site was designed for someone reading on a phone, perhaps standing on a platform, and the decision to book arrives at an unpredictable moment. Making them scroll back to the top loses the ones who decided late.

What it costA strip of screen on every page. On a phone, that is the right trade.

The hotel’s home page on a phone, first screen, with Call, WhatsApp and Book fixed along the bottom

Further down the same page, the Twin Room, with the same Call, WhatsApp and Book bar along the bottom

In the pictures: the first screen, and further down, at the rooms: the same three buttons, all the way down.

5 of 5

Fourteen pages, custom-coded, no page builder.

Eight named spaces under one roof: Galaxy, the restaurant; Bellers, the bar; The Grand Barbeque, the rooftop terrace; The Turning Point and Blue Heaven, the banquet halls; Sparkle, for small gatherings; and two private dining rooms, Ballantine and Rose. Each does a different job for a different guest. A wedding enquiry and a one-night business stay are not the same visit and should not land on the same page.

Custom-coded because the pages had to load fast on a phone, and because nothing on the site depends on a page builder’s subscription.

What it costMore work than a template. The hotel cannot restyle it by dragging things about, which is also what keeps it looking like itself a year later.

Home: Live like an Ambassador.
About: The house on Railway Road.
Rooms and suites, then a page each for the Twin Room, the Executive Room and the Suite
Dining and bar, and the menu, page by page
Celebrations, and weddings and events
Gallery: the house, room by room
Booking: pick the room, price it live
Contact and directions, and privacy

Every page on the site, from its own sitemap. Open the live site

What went live

What a guest can do there today.

Check availability from the first screen: pick dates and guests, and the hotel’s own booking page shows them back beside its booking engine.
See three room types, each with its own page and its own photographs.
Find eight named spaces, each described for the guest it serves: Galaxy, Bellers, The Grand Barbeque, The Turning Point, Blue Heaven, Sparkle, Ballantine and Rose.
Ask about any room on WhatsApp, with the room named and a line each for dates and guests.
Read guests’ reviews in full, and honest distances on the directions page.

What we would change: one thing, and it is a discipline rather than a design

Nothing on a hotel site should quote a rate that the booking engine controls. A line about a seasonal discount went live, and a discount is exactly the kind of fact that changes without anyone telling the person who built the website. It has been removed, and the rule now is that the site describes the hotel and the engine quotes the price, never both. You only learn that once a site is live. It is also why the site links straight through to the engine rather than restating anything it says.

In the owner’s words

Rather hear it from the owner?

What I liked is that he came and saw the property first, and then wrote the site around what is actually here — the banquet hall, Bellers, the rooftop, the rooms. He did not use stock photographs. When I asked for changes he made them the same week. For any hotel owner in Punjab thinking about this, that is the part that matters.

Gurkirat Khurana · Owner, The Grand Ambassador, PhagwaraDrafted by Aditya from the project record. The owner chose this version and approved it in September 2026.

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