This site cost $18m to make

http://www.preview.fourseasons.com/

by instakill • 15 years ago

51 86 15 years ago

preview.fourseasons.com

instakill• 15 years ago

Here's the story: http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/8676-four-seasons-unveils-18...

iaskwhy• 15 years ago

Kinda off-topic, from the article: "The 2012 Four Seasons Luxury Trends Report from Four Seasons reveals that 71% of its customers bring a smartphone with them on their travels and 61% bring a tablet device."

That's a lot. And even so, my only two experiences at luxury hotels meant no wifi available in the room. And daily paid ethernet. I understand being there meant me or my company have money but I'd like to stop being ripped off after paying so much to stay there.

mrfairladyz• 15 years ago

On a related note to the off-topic point, visiting the website from a mobile device yields a surprisingly good mobile interface.

waterlesscloud• 15 years ago

The article talks a lot about the new site being an effort to increase their online bookings. I can see that for a luxury brand hotel, online bookings might be lower than for say holiday inn express. Part of what you're paying for is personal attention, so the people who stay there might want that to extend to the booking experience.

How do you overcome that in an online booking? I don't think they did, but how would you approach it?

josefresco• 15 years ago

It's weird, some elements of the design look to be 5-6 years old in style, while other are clearly inspired by Microsoft's Metro UI (which is good).

The small font size and traditional 'luxury hotel' look of the header/footer really ruin it for me (example look how the tagline in the tiny logo is almost unreadable). Where they succeed (mostly) is in the page content layout and design.

Also, shrinking my browser window doesn't dynamically resize or shift the layout so -1 for unresponsiveness. I was on a sub page of the Boston location which may not have that flexibility but for 18M and 2012 ... it should.

thomasgerbe3• 15 years ago

"Also, shrinking my browser window doesn't dynamically resize or shift the layout so -1 for unresponsiveness. I was on a sub page of the Boston location which may not have that flexibility but for 18M and 2012 ... it should."

Responsive design also limits design/ux decisions especially on their content pages which have a non-linear grid system and shouldn't be universal. I'm not for or against responsive web design but I think it should be contextual. I haven't seen many sites that have won me over.

DrinkWater4• 15 years ago

Lets assume they received a custom CMS with the website, some custom frontend-plugins, development of flash entities, interfaces to in-house IT-systems, a tracking suite, hosting, QA, send some photographers around the world to get high quality pictures, consulting....Still i cant figure out HOW this can cost $18M (and i am a technical consultant in digital agency, working exclusively for enterprise customers).

cfontes2• 15 years ago

I also do that for a living... and they got stolen or their management team sucks badly. With 18M you can build 18 of that site. For some minutes I thought 18M was 18k(which would be too low)... then I got it, and got even more surprised. The only explanation I can think of is that they didn't had a IT department and had to Hire and buy every single person/thing they needed including hosting their own site on their own servers and buying their own Backbone :D

tintin• 15 years ago

I think it's the complete marketing package. The website is just the result of a complete new marketing strategy.

But still.. that's some serious money thrown away.

tacheshun• 15 years ago

They didn't receive a custom CMS. Actually, they used Adobe CQ5 for this.

casca2• 15 years ago

If you've never been involved in the building of a website for a large company then this might come as a surprise. Getting agreement for so many things would have taken many people months of time. "Lean Startup" where things don't work on day 1 is not an option. Include focus groups, armies of usability testing, all sorts of integration misery and this doesn't seem a crazy big number. They don't get 4 developers who'll work for 2 years for 12 hours a day for no money.

alexchamberlain• 15 years ago

4 developers for 2 years doesn't cost $18million...

cfontes2• 15 years ago

20 devs/DBA/IT for 2 years would cost you something like 4M, 8M at max(Super Salaries for everybody) !

The costly part is the "Management" which creates the bureaucracy so other people can hang out in the project controlling excel tables while those 20 bastards work their asses off.

mtrimpe• 15 years ago

From what I can tell it looks like a fairly decent deal.

The site is snappy, visually impressive and with a well thought out user experience, tasteful upsell and in general clear communication.

At least it launched and managed to avoid all the pitfalls of corporate politics leading to bad architectural choices leading to a very expensive and poor implementation, which is a much more difficult challenge by itself than most people realize.

It's important to remember that:

* very few great developers/designers will work for Four Seasons on the cheap.

* it'll mostly have been well paid consultants earning $100/hr and up

* it is very likely that the project has had multiple iterations to reach it's current state, all hidden behind a single big release.

DrinkWater4• 15 years ago

Try deactivating JavaScript and look at the page. For $18M i would expect something else.

zachinglis• 15 years ago

I can't say WHO, but I've been leading the UX on a large newspaper site. There's huge feedback loops, tens of people to sign off per page and a ton of usability testing.

They have their own in-house development team. I can bet you we've not come anywhere close to that and the site is absolutely HUGE.

I suspect somewhere someone was given this as a budget and they had to spend it, or lose it.

casca2• 15 years ago

The in-house dev team is the secret here. You can pay each person $60k/year and they have management who will say "No, that's not possible with our resources".

Compared to the Four Seasons outsource model where anyone can say "I want that feature" and will be told "Sure, it'll cost an extra $1m of someone else's money".

markokocic• 15 years ago

You forgot various change request, often contradictory by different departments, countless changes to things already signed, specified, implemented, tested and deployed, at least three starts from scratch because of different "visions" ...

djhworld• 15 years ago

Most of the costs probably came from expensive consultants/contractors during the analysis phase. I'm going to take a punt and say that Oracle is probably involved somewhere down the chain. Whether it be Weblogic or OracleDB, I bet they had a whole load of consultants to come in long before development started

rattler• 15 years ago

$18 Mil and blurry images - http://cdn.fourseasons.com/content/dam/fourseasons/images/we...

thevictor• 15 years ago

Well that trumps this website http://www.bankwest.com.au/ which cost $5 million to make.

meric• 15 years ago

Did that come with the online banking site, or is $5M just for that one page?

pan692• 15 years ago

Online Banking is usually done internally by banks. The front facing consumer sites are usually done by an agency.

I know that Host was doing work for Bank West. Anyone knows if they also did this as well or are they just above the line for this client?

brador2• 15 years ago

So here's how you do it.

You write a spec sheet, bid low. You want to win the bid. Say 6 mil, maybe even 5. Then half way through the project, say you need another 3 mil to finish, and without that you can't finish it. Sunk costs? don't worry, the flip rate on staff means the sunk costs were the last guys problem.

Continue asking for more until you can't squeeze any more juice out of the orange that is your client. Congratulations, you just won at corporate politics. Ship whatever you've done and say it's the best you could do. Done.

raldi• 15 years ago

...and lost at contract law.

brador2• 15 years ago

11 Billion: http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/waste/2011/08/system-failur...

sajidnizami• 15 years ago

Odd. Every other place in Middle East is listed, except the one with the most tourist attractions. Where is Dubai?

ljf• 15 years ago

Not odd - it closed down a while back: http://www.fourseasons.com/dubaigolf/message0609/

tucaz• 15 years ago

I'm surprised that no one yet said anything about the 18M being a fake number. These guys do this all the time. They spend 10M and release to the press that it was 20M.

I work(ed) for more than one company that uses this strategy. The whole idea is to get everyone to think that you are bigger than you really are.

Of course one can spend 18M on a bad project, but you guys covered it already...

dotjosh• 15 years ago

This is exactly it. Not to mention all of the "internal" resources/time they put into that number. I also imagine they did an overhaul of their internal booking system, and possibly increased full-time staff (project managers, support, and sales staff) to handle the new demand.

tomelders• 15 years ago

I suppose only the client can decide wether that's money well spent or not. And while I think the price is high, it's certainly not the worst hotel website I've seen, and is probably one of the better ones.

plf• 15 years ago

How? I've just started experimenting with web development and I can't figure out how it could possibly cost that much. Maybe there is a whole world I haven't seen yet, but if they had used the latest open source libraries/frameworks that do half the work for you, would it have cost that much?

unreal37• 15 years ago

I work in a digital agency, similar to the one who did this. 80% of the budget is spent in the requirements phase. More than a year doing designs, sending 20 people down to see the client every trip, business requirements gathering, market analysis, and such.

$18M over 24 months is only $750K per month burn rate. At the typical agency rate of $150/hr, this is 35 people working on this project. Only 2 of them are developers. :)

marknutter3• 15 years ago

The best way to kick the hornets' nest over at HN is to mention lots of money exchanging hands (i.e. color.com). Nothing brings out the self-righteous geek in us than hearing about other developers getting paid.

zedshaw• 15 years ago

Right. Developers getting paid. You hear that sound? Listen real carefully. It's the sound of our profession being flushed down a toilet because your buddies are cheating businesses out of their money by charging too much for too little.

gaius• 15 years ago

You've both made the classic fallacy of assuming that writing some code is all there is to do. For example, perhaps a lot of that money went on paying a photographer and his entourage to fly around the world.

jbooth• 15 years ago

Well, it's probably more like the company charging themselves too much by having a ridiculously mismanaged process for getting the work done.

Incoherent, produced-by-committee specs that don't actually have any explanation about how the soup of buttons and buzzwords is supposed to work, ridiculous management overhead.. it's probably not even the developers getting paid that much. Nobody walked off with that money, it was pissed away in 6-hour meetings.

eykanal• 15 years ago

Do you hear that sound? It's the sound of your buddies charging appropriately for their skills while you consistently undercharge.

xentronium• 15 years ago

To be frank, I always thought that our profession was being flushed down a toilet because some guys were cheating themselves by charging too little for too much. Go figure.

Spearchucker• 15 years ago

You say that, but consider what it takes to build a web site for an organisation like Four Seasons.

You’d probably spend 6 months alone on producing the various specifications and plans, and deal with governance (reviews and revisions, sign-off, acceptance and so on). You’d build out a proper information architecture (a little more than the average SharePoint TeamSite taxonomy).

To show you how realistic that number is, consider the scale of documentation Four Seasons would require you produce. Those docs would probably include, but not be limited to:

Project/team structure

Risk assessment

Vision/Scope

Business requirements

User requirements

System requirements

Operational requirements

Usage scenarios

Conceptual design

Logical design

Physical design

Availability plan

Backup and recovery plan

Budget plan

Capacity plan

Communications plan

Deployment plan

Development plan

End user support plan

Project plan

Project schedule

Pilot plan

Purchasing and facilities plan

Security plan

Support plan

Test plan

Training plan

And after all that you haven’t even written a line of code (other than the inevitable throw-away proofs of concept and demonstrators).

Imagine having to estimate the effort required to produce that set. The analysis alone will take a herd of business analysts months.

Like Steve Sinofsky said – new businesses (start-ups), or even new markets, simply cannot solve the class of problems that is addressed by larger and more established firms.

[Edit] That list up there excludes systems integration (hotel reservations, customer care, etc) and data migration - both of which can add orders of magnitude to a project.

noodle• 15 years ago

We're talking about Four Seasons here. If this project cost $1m instead of $18m, I'm pretty confident that the other $17m would not be going into our profession.

Unless your metaphor is more about the legitimacy of our profession. If that is the case, I'd point out that we have no inside knowledge on the situation, and then I'd use Four Seasons as a counterpoint -- they charge crazy rates for a fancy hotel room, yet they're not destroying the hotel industry.

marknutter3• 15 years ago

Right. And I suppose Mercedes is flushing the automobile manufacturing profession down the toilet because they're cheating customers by charging too much for too little as well?

Geekette• 15 years ago

If the site cost 18M, it does not mean all 18M went to developers (total probably includes other planning & logistics costs). I say "if" because the article from the econsultancy link provided in comments here states 18M without any source to confirm that figure.

pan692• 15 years ago

Yes. You can be pretty sure that the developers where still underpaid.

[that's sarcasm of course]

ed209• 15 years ago

these kind of headlines are easy, the actual story behind it determines value for money. For example, this title is about as insightful as - BP spent £136,000,000 on a "new logo" ... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1350238/BP-attacked-o...

mgcross• 15 years ago

I wonder if photography was rolled into that cost? I'm sure some shots are reused and rights-managed stock, but for those that aren't, the costs of planning, lighting, rigging, stylists, talent, etc. would be significant. And it looks as though each location has 30+ photographs: http://www.preview.fourseasons.com/find_a_hotel_or_resort/

alevans4• 15 years ago

Is there an older story on the internet than a software project overruns budget or doesn't get finished? I'd be more interested to see something like, software project costs $18M and here's where we went wrong, or software project costs $18M and here's why the client got their money's worth.

revorad• 15 years ago

Lesson learnt: charge more.

beambot• 15 years ago

If the website redesign results in 1% more direct conversions on their website (versus discount "Hotels.com" outfits), then $18M is probably a fairly decent "investment".

Perhaps the developers were smart and made a value proposition rather than a pure hourly / salary proposition. Others on HN have talked about this distinction extensively, so try to avoid that little mental roadblock when considering the amount that they paid for the redesign.

funkah• 15 years ago

I think it looks great. And, it's in my interest for websites to cost as much as possible, so I have no problem with this.

I don't understand that thing nerds do where they brag about how they could have done it in a weekend for $15 and some Mountain Dew. Well, I do understand it ("look how smart I am"), but it's still obnoxious.

coenhyde• 15 years ago

From what I can tell:

- It's hosted on AWS

- Their CDN is cloudfront

- 2 elastic AWS loadbalancers

- Apache webserver, probably with Tomcat

- Java session id in cookie

I assumed the site would have been either a Java or .Net site. I would have done it for $12 million ;)

luhsna• 15 years ago

If they spent 18M for this then they should probably fire their CTO or whoever approved this budget. IF

spydum2• 15 years ago

Judging by the URL structure, this is built on Adobe (formerly Day)'s Communique 5.x platform.

The CQ Platform gives you a ton of these graphical widgets and social interaction out of the box, though there is still plenty of development to write a full reservation system. It also handle mobile rendering, site templating, and multiple languages quite well.

So while it sounds like people are seeing "a single website for $18m", I'd be willing to wager that was the cost for the entire content platform (CMS/Social/Mailings/Reservation system. So now they would have access to very advanced templating design, multi-lingual components.

The amount of time it would take them to roll out multiple country and language sites would be dwarfed in comparison to any other platform. That $18m may be a big upfront costs, but might well pay for itself if they intend to use for other properties and across multiple regions/languages.

notjustanymike• 15 years ago

Definitely CQ - pretty impressive in that regard. Having worked with the platform, I can tell you -good- CQ5 developers are very expensive and hard to acquire. Conde Nast is learning this the hard way after they committed to converting all their properties over to CQ.

spydum2• 15 years ago

True enough, but with a total cost of $18m, I'd guess they went full consultancy -- not done in house.

Completely unrelated, does MJK mean anything to you?

usedtolurk• 15 years ago

The website itself is just be the tip of the iceberg - it would need to talk to multiple back-end systems. $18m wouldn't be unreasonable if the project required complex legacy integration and/or re-design of underlying infrastructure.

Lucadg• 15 years ago

I've been working on an online reservation CMS for more than 2 years now and this seems quite a good result. Maybe I would have done some things differently, such as location selection: the drop down is really long, the could have used an autosuggest. But everybody likes different things so I can only assume their usability tests suggested otherwise.

The price is not really something we can judge: it could be either fair or too much. Who knows, this may be a very flexible framework they'll use for the next X years (good) or a hard to maintain website which will cost them even more to keep alive.

We can't really judge.

I wish I had 18 Millions to develop mine. Or maybe not, I'm happy with scarce resources, so little goes wasted.

ricardobeat2• 15 years ago

So? It's a pack of ~90 sites + the main one, content management systems that will probably be used by hundreds, photography.. the cost is not surprising at all.

They could do a better job of graceful degradation for javascript disabled without much effort, but I wouldn't blame them - everyone here seems to support the opposing mindset too.

md224• 15 years ago

Anyone else check the source and notice they're importing jQuery twice?

sirbrad• 15 years ago

The site is awesome. The UX is spot on! I think people have seen the price tag and expected something unimaginable. Not quite sure why they chose to use an Adobe application for the cms side of things.

pragmatic• 15 years ago

Is it just me or is the text at the bottom of each picture (with the location, temp, etc) unreadable in at least half the locations? The white on white is a bad idea.

This must be a "marketing" driven site where "good ideas" trump usability. I'm sure they got an award or three for this cutting edge design.

justin_vanw• 15 years ago

I bet this site (Wynn Las Vegas) costs $18m per year in lost opportunities, because it's an unusable mess. http://wynnlasvegas.com/

It's slow, often times out, randomly doesn't work. The four seasons may have over paid for their site, but it's incredibly nice.

mustardhamsters2• 15 years ago

I think for $18m they're probably making significantly more than that back. That really is a damned fine website, and you can tell that every piece of it has been double checked and agonized over with the client.

This site cost $18m to make

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