What do you typically expect to glimpse on a travel and tourism website? Great photography of exotic locations, stunning full-screen background images, use of vibrant colors and excellent typography are the quintessential features that induces the visitors to book their tickets right away and take a trip to the striking location. Websites promoting tourism destinations often lay emphasis on design and appearance with an intention to draw attention of the potential tourists.
To convert the potential tourists into customers, travel websites principally need to provide valuable information related to tourist destinations and make the process of reservation and booking easier for them. Therefore not only exceptional visual impression is of the essence but smooth functionality is also equally significant. More than any other industry, website for travel business is utterly decisive as people would love to explore and know about the locations before they land there physically.
Just good-looking website is not enough to generate revenue from the travel business, you need to chiefly focus on some key features that will shoot up the bookings and bring in more profits:
Landing page:
It is the first destination where your web visitors would land so try making it as visually striking as possible. If this page is appealing then only visitors would be interested to explore the website. Use mesmerizing background images that will instantly grab attention of the targeted audience. Use pictures of soothing and striking nature elements or panoramic views and incorporate it with killer one liner that will appeal to the visitors.
Menu bar:
Your tourist website’s menu bar should cover all the topics that the potential tourist would like to know about. It should provide all the essential information related to a particular location or travel destinations.
Main components of menu bar:
About location:
In this section, all the necessary information related to a specific location should be mentioned like history, culture and tradition, time zone, weather, travel map, route, famous places etc. It should display a complete picture of that location.
Place of interest/ tourist spots:
Under this menu you need to focus on the places to explore, it may be tourist spots, shopping place, famous hotels, gardens, sightseeing spots, safari and so on. Whatever is the specialty of that location, reveal it.
Accommodation:
Your part is not just to talk about the place; you also need to provide information about the stay. If the business is involved in planning complete trip or offering packages, then accommodation has to be highlighted on the menu bar. Mention the type of lodging facilities offered by the travel company.
Blog:
Every location has some great stories to talk about; you can present them attractively in the form of articles in blogs. You can write in detail about some particular tourist destination and make it attention grabbing. Blogs are great way to make the site more informative and interactive. You can also invite people to write their travel stories, this will increase more interaction.
Contact:
Contact option is an integral part of the tourist website. Customers would definitely want to get in touch to seek information, to place any query or ask for advice. The contact us page should include contact number, email id, physical address and also a contact form.
Sorting and filtering:
Travel and tourism website has arrays of fields to explore and seeking for exact information out of numerous options can sometimes become niggling for the potential tourists. Hence sorting and filtering is an ideal solution for such kind of websites. Sorting allows the users to arrange the categories as per their preference rather than searching from the pre-determined category.
You can offer the visitors to sort or filter the sections, alphabetical wise, date wise, grading (high, low, medium), rating, pricing, venue wise, based on facilities and so on. You can opt for drop down listing as it will minimize the screen space and make the layout look neat and clean.
The main goal of any travel business website is to turn the tourism site visitors into actual tourism sight visitors. So start your journey to a great tourism website by following the above route.
