Making a Travel Website

A website can be your number one selling tool where everything comes together. Its a platform to show and sell all those great experiences you have on offer and to showcase your vision, passions, values that make you stand out compared to other tourism businesses.

When you are creating a new website for your tourism organization you start with your strategy. Without a strategy you won't be able to make a good website because it will be very hard to make the right content and design choices.

In your strategy you have defined:

• What do you want to achieve and why
• What are your offering
• For who are the experiences created
• Why should they love me or why do they love you

You define you, purpose, vision, goals, niche with top destinations and experiences, your target audience and your unique selling points.  

This will define your content needs but will also determine the design that you need.

When you have your strategy defined; dig a bit deeper.

How can my website contribute the the goals from my strategy, what role does my website play in the customer journey which conversion do i want to focus on, how will they lead to more sales, which steps do i believe travelers need to go through on my website before making a booking.

Translating your Goals into Conversions on your Website

Before you go further it's good to think about what is needed to reach the goals from strategy and digital marketing plan.

For example you need a certain amount of visitors, but these visitors also need to take steps to eventually make a booking, what steps do they need to make ?

For example

• Inspire: Be Inspired with my offers through great visuals and then scroll, click further.
• Help: Learn about my company by reading my about us page > people staying at least 30 sec
• Proof: Read my reviews - people scrolling to the review part, outbound links to review partners
• Sell : Sending people to actions bringing them closer to a booking -> sign up with a newsletter, scheduling a video call, go to a booking form, contact us, use the chat etc.

In the underneath example of Kuoni you see 4 clear sell elements: Book an Appointment, Email Is, Call Us, Chat with us.

Understanding your Customer Journey

Start thinking about what kind of questions the visitor of your website has, and how you can answer the easily and drive them to the services and experiences of their needs.

Think about how you can guide people interested in your destination or niche towards a booking.

People don't end up just buying directly on your website, the will come back multiple times before you are able to pull off a sale.

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Therefore your most important first step is to inspire your persona to come your destination or doing your experience and wow them in such a way they want to come back to be guide on how to make these experiences happen.

When people come back to your website, they probably have an idea or goal on what they want to do. But they get distracted very fast and might get lost on their initial idea or get a new idea starting a new journey. If you want to keep them in the booking flow of what they wear searching for you want to actively guide them to next steps and keep on confirming them in their choice. Once a traveler made a choice, try to to not offer them new choices over and over to keep them focused.

While being helpful, it's your job to remove any doubts a visitor might have about coming to your destination and to give a good idea what this person can do in your destination and what to expect about the experiences.

Besides that you need to proof that other people like your visitor and industry experts love your company and destination with reviews and recommendations.

And only if the above is done, visitors are ready to be send and go through your booking form.

During this process you need to build trust with the visitor and make them happy.

We call this framework inspire, help, proof & sell

Preparation & Briefing

After you set your strategy and have and understanding of the role your website play in the customer journey, you have to translate this in a briefing for your web developer. Normally the web developer will guide you in this process, but the more you are able to take the lead, the higher the change the end result will reflect your strategy.

Before making your the design briefing of your website select some sites of competitors your really love. Analyze how the converted their strategy onto the website and think about where you can improve this. What elements of the website can you make easier.

Start with a sitemap to plot all the pages you need and then create page table to define what kind of information you need on which page. Design the customer journey toward the conversion goals on your site map and page tables by defining next steps per content block and building logic ways to navigate to your website towards a booking.

To help you we create a sample page table of a homepage for a tour operator company, copy and use the template as your want.

The you start with the design.

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Designing your travel website

You have to keep your website as user friendly as you can. Meaning a visitors should be able to quicky scan through pages and have an idea what you offer and what you stand for, without reading all information in detail. Besides that a user needs to be able to quickly navigate or find the experience they are looking for or matches their travel needs the most.

People most probably book at once, they need to come back, make it easy to share your website, or make it easy for them to get more in detailed info in their mailbox, like for example a guide that will turn your destination into an experience they will never forget.  

Make your website visual, visuals are remembered longer and better then text and are faster to transfer information. The combination of short texts and image can improve to get the essence with a factor 6 compared to only text.

The goal of the design of your website is to make sure the visitor can execute what they want without friction / thinking, staying in an i like this flow.

To keep travelers in such a flow, means that the site should follow design standards. This makes your website easy to use and predictable, because most websites work the same as yours.

Make sure you present clear what your customers are searching for: your best experiences, what are the highlights and cost, reasons why to do business with your travel company, to come to your destination and what others say about you.

When creating a destination marketing website you want to make sure you pay attention to what travelers spend their money on: accommodations, tours, attractions, food, events and shopping.  

Try to guide people into the direction you want them, by offering limited choices. The more you ask from a visitor the less they will do, this is what we call the paradox of choice.

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A rule of thumb is that giving more then 12 choices becomes overwhelming and choices on a row should be more then 3, max 4.

Not only think about your best products and destinations but also when you want people to come, if you want more people to come in low season guide your visitors into that directions by giving them reasons why that season is the best season for them.

And also important with who they come. By creating for example blocks for families, solo travelers, etc. The idea behind these blocks is that you make it easy for customers to find an experience they love. You help them through the sales process.

Websites that structured their content to be scanned showed an increase in measured usability of 47%

When designing your webpages you want to design with in the back of your mind, that if people scan the page quickly they got the most important message.

When users scan, they’re looking for great pictures and search for specific words and sentences that give a confirmation that they are on the right page.

Besides using visuals that not only show the beauty of your destination but also represents your persona's, use headings subheadings to break up content so users can visually jump to the section that is relevant to them.

Inspire, Help, Proof & Sell

Each page of your website needs to Inspire, Help, Proof & Sell.

Inspire

Inspiring you will do with a beautiful opening picture or video of your most important travel product, experienced by your most important persona preferable showcasing one of your Unique Selling Points.

This part of the website is called the hero section. The visual will be combined with a header introducing the offer and a subheading that explains more. It needs to be clear that you need to scroll down for further information, for example with the help of an arrow.

A tag line if you feel that is appropriate and not harming your visual should share a reason why the traveler should to this.

Help

Show why people should visit your destinations and do your experiences, but also give them the links to have all the information they need to make a proper decision.

You can be helpful with giving your audiences easy choices, towards your best experiences like Sydney.com is doing by showing their must do experiences. Note how they support their images with text that describes the outcome for you as a visitor: Get Thrills, Swim, See from New Perspective, Hang out with Animals instead of saying the name of the experience.  

Another example of help is from Beck Hall Hotel in England. They use a smart visual way to show highlights around their hotel and how close they are.

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Proof

Reviews, testimonials, awards that are won should all be present on each page, proof is an important tool you have to give a traveler the confidence to choose for you.

Sell

The ultimate goal is selling a booking or getting a traveler to your destination. This won't go in one step, people take small steps towards a booking and need to be guided to it.

You encourage visitors of your website to a next step with a Call To Action; CTA. Each block should have a CTA to a new page and or and encouragement to read further. The ultimate CTA is the filling up of booking form.

For clarity its a good idea to have all your CTA's the same design so people understand or see your CTA's quickly.

For a destination marketing website, selling is sending people to tourism companies that offer the accommodations, transport and experiences. You can do this directly, or through an OTA, the benefit of sending traffic to an OTA is that its, easy and your DMO can earn some money to finance the website. Better would to make a trade database like Australia.com has.

Underneath example of Israel shows a clever way of sending travellers to different kind of OTA's so there is no problem in favoring one above the other, if you do such a solution as a DMO you want to first check if there are no local partners who can does this, so that money doesn't leak out of the country.

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The tour / experience or product page

Besides Inspire, Help, Proof & Sell you want to highlight those elements on your product pages that are most important for you key clients / personas to decide if this tour is something for them.

Travelers not only want to know what is offered, but also want to have a quick price indication to judge if the package is something for them.

What elements need to be communicated on a tour page?

• Why should the visitor go on this tour, if possible you communicate this in your first header
• For who is this tour designed, combine this with an under header or in the summery of your tour page.
• Why should the visitor do this experience in this destination and not somewhere else,
• Why should this visitors do this tour with your travel company.
• What did others like the visitor thought about this experiences (Reviews).
• With what other kind of experience can you combine this tour ?
• How do i book this tour ?
• What are the booking conditions.  

Its crucial to think about how you will sell, do you offer direct selling with an online payment possibility or do you prefer the visitor to use the experience information to get into contact with you.

For direct bookings, people need to have more trust in your company, this can be difficult if your client comes from oversea. Especially if the trust in your country is perceived weak. Having objective reviews, mentions in magazines, awards are all crucial to show to win that trust.

To create a flexible solution try to work in blocks

Inspire;

• Visuals that show the best of the tour / experience

Help

• Visuals that show for who is it
• Short explanation why this experience and for who
• Highlights
• Details of the offer

Proof

• Reviews
• Awards
• Social Feeds

Sell

• Easy contact forms
• Online booking form
• Newsletter subscriptions
• Chat
• Phone / Email address to get into quick contact

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Themed Landing Pages to organize your experiences

To make it easy to find your product pages with experiences and itineraries you can make themed landing pages that organize your products based on a theme, for example all experiences targeted at solo travelers or all experience that involve nature or landing pages that are centered around certain times of the year like winter, summer or events like bank holidays and thanksgiving.

Landing pages for special offers

To promote a certain experience with a very good offer, you can create special offer pages that focus on the offer you created. For example a discount for the low season. Or a special Black Friday offer for travelers searching for a good deal. Keep these pages simple, make sure the offer is clear and there aren't many distractions.

Do keep the same Inspire, Help, Proof and Sale format and make sure you brand your company with the input of your vision, values and USP's so that even if visitors don't go for the offer they have a clear understanding what makes your company unique and why they should travel with you.

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Being found in search engines

Make sure your website can be found easily in search engines by having a technical set up search engines prefer: fast loading, mobile friendly easy to read codes and clear structured content.

Structured content means you defined easy to read titles, sub header and have a nice mix of text, images, videos and maybe even downloadable files to communicate your message.

Read more about Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Mobile Phones

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All of the above also works on mobile phones, the scanning though might go much faster. They needs to triggered to stop at important elements with proper call to actions, the right pictures and well written short headings.

Having a bit of different content on a mobile phone or at least the way its presented compared to a desktop could be a very good idea.

Most visits are happening on mobile phones in 2022, the change you website is first discovered on a mobile is much higher especially if you don't focus your ads on driving travelers to your desktop. (Facebook, Insta etc, people see your advertisement in a mobile environment).

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Tourism Website builders

The great thing of today is, that you don't need to spend massive amounts of money anymore on a website. There are awesome website builders that offer ready made template based on the latest marketing insights.

With these kind of systems you don't have to bother about hosting and techniques but only about content.

A great example of a tourism website made with a website builder is the destination promotion website of Door County, in Wisconsin USA, which is build with SimpleView

The website of Door County is excellent and has all the elements to guide a visitor with inspiring and helpful content, that is backed up by proof and a very good sales system.

The opening or hero section of the Door County shows the destination is an outdoor destination, with lots of exploration possibilities. The menus come from a smart set up CMS where Door County only has to organize the content, the systems feeds it to the visitors is a structured way. You can argue that there are maybe a bit to many options in the menu. The extra attention for Food & Drink feeds into a trend and the events and festivals button shows there are lot of things to do. You could think if those are the traffic drivers for Door Country. The business directory show all businesses in the area in a very structured way, interesting in the system is that its connected with a direct booking tool that helps to bring ecommerce to all the tourism companies in the area.  

If you need something simpler webflow is a great choice, its an easy to use website builder with many templates, it does have a small learning curve, but also a big community to who you can outsource your website development for very affordable rates. VTP is training and making websites with youths in Africa and Asia to deliver tourism websites.

For Tour Operators there is Springnest a pre set up tour operator website builder, that is very easy to use. If you want to work with the popular Wordpress platform than the WP Travel plug in could be something for you.

Measuring and Improving your website

When designing your website you have to make choices, where do i place which destination, experience etc, to help you check if you made the right decision, you can use A/B testing and or heat map solutions. A/B tests help you to discover which solutions worked best version a or b. While heatmaps help you to identify where people click.

Another tool that helps you analyze what works and what doesn't is Google Analytics. There are more trackers out there, but its easy to set up integration with search results from Google make it a preferred tool for analyzing your results.

Constantly improving, extending and updating your designs will help you to get a better website with more visitors.

Setting up a measuring system for your website

When you are setting up a measuring system for your website you want to be sure what you measure is aligned with the goals from your strategy and your digital marketing plan.

You could use underneath step plan to implement a measuring system

1. Create measurable objectives for your website from these goals for example 10,000 dollar revenue might mean 100,000 pages views and 100 times a form filled in (an enquiry received)
2. Create a list of questions you want to use to improve your website, for example which market segments do well on my website see for more example of questions the measuring section in the blog about a digital marketing plan. You can use Generative AI tools like Chat GPT to help you defining the right questions.
3. Make a list of the conversions on the website that lead or contribute to these goals and or give context for your questions, but make sure you use the date, don't measure stuff you are not going to use.
4. Think about form submissions, purchases, newsletter signups, chat interactions, which buttons are clicked, sharing in social media, checking your social media and or important page combinations (for example about us and product pages) and time spent on the website / pages.
5. Configure Google Analytics - check for example if data retention is set on max.
6. Start measuring first the simple stuff - simple conversions like someone spending more than 30 seconds on my website, are already extremely helpful, to understand what kind of people your website resonates with. Once that works start implement the more difficult to measure conversions.
7. Configure Google Tag Manager - use Google Tag Manager to measure when people are interacting with your chat or other more advanced events. Als make sure your cookies settings are configured as per demand google for a maximum visibility of your website in all continents especially Europe.

Make websites with VTP Digital Marketing

At VTP digital marketing we can guide you with the process of building complex website with your tech partner, and or when you have a smaller budget we can connect you digital marketing teams in Zambia and Myanmar that can provide very affordable digital marketing services including website building in Webflow for you.

Contact us now for more information

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