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.
Seriously now, what is it, 1999?
The intersection of "people who deactivate JS" and "The addressable market of Four Seasons Hotels" is likely small enough that the lost potential sales wouldn't even cover the cost of development.
And i dont think that money was an issue in this project.
I think it makes sense that high-value employees with access to sensitive information get basic cybersecurity education. Therefore, some of them block JavaScript.
In no other industry do consumers get that kind of luxury. It'd be like the music industry putting new releases on cassette tapes for the people who haven't upgraded to CD or MP3 yet.
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.
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".
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.