Do you love to travel? Would you like to travel and also make a living while doing it?
Your travel business, whether it involves blogging or travel agency services, requires a great website to get the job done. Building such a website is no easy task, though, so it’s not something that should be done with little thought.
If you want to have a great travel website, it might help to study some other great websites.
Expedia has one of the more attractive and clean-cut travel websites. The interface is optimized for gorgeous imagery. The homepage offers breathtaking picture links of various areas of the globe, which entices its visitors to keeping clicking through them while they search for the information they desire.
The company also offers plenty of pages throughout to direct visitors’ attention. For example, there are activity pages that provide options and tips for activities like parasailing, whale watching, white-water rafting, and more. This site has done an excellent job with both its design and meeting the needs of prospective customers.
Priceline focuses less on showing users a range of travel opportunities and more on getting straight to the point. The company’s homepage begins with a place for you to enter your destination and dates of travel.
From there, you can book a hotel, rental car, flight, vacation package, cruise, and other travel features. The entire theme of Priceline’s site seems to revolve around relaxing vibes. The color scheme is a soft blue, so it feels like a vacation is calling your name.
Booking.com is part of the Priceline group, but the designs are different enough that it merits separate consideration. The homepage supplies innumerable resources, which is great for the average traveler.
Even though there’s a lot of information here, the designers did a good job of creating a homepage that doesn’t feel cluttered or overwhelming. The most important features, such as the dates and destination search bar, as well as the featured nearby locations, stand out and are easy to use.
Other features are available, but they sink into the background so the reader can focus on what they prefer, and turn to the other resources only if and when they’re desired.
The design of this one is clean but highly enticing. The homepage opens with an attractive cityscape and a handy date and destination search bar. Navigation is very clean, so visitors can easily sift through hotels, flights, cars, and other items to compare the prices on each.
The simplicity of this page is to be applauded. Everything the visitor needs is on the homepage, and if you want more information, you can simply click a link that takes you to another well-designed page.
For example, Kayak offers top destination links to places like San Francisco. When you click on the link, you can see hotels, cars, flights, and other services and attractions at great prices.
As the name indicates, the primary function of this website is to locate hotels, though car and flight packaging options are also available. Because hotels are the primary focus, however, the designers use them as a design feature.
Visitors can search hotels close to popular amenities so they can book the best possible location. By reading reviews, customers can learn whether a particular hotel will provide everything they need.
Like Expedia, this site might not have the extras that some other travel sites offer, but perhaps that tactical efficiency is one of the reasons for its success.
The function of this site is to help people find the best value in hotels, flights, vacation rentals, restaurants, excursions, and other vacation activities at the best price. It has pages dedicated to beaches, attractions, islands, top destinations, and various other attractions.
The design is easy to follow and the imagery pulls in visitors for a great online experience. There are tons of resources on this site, and the designers keep it from appearing cluttered through the use of high-quality imagery and extensive footers.
If your focus on is mainly on keeping things as simple as possible, Hotwire is a great website to visit. The homepage is devoted solely to a beautiful background image with the search bar for destination and dates up front.
You can look for flights, hotels, cars, and package deals on this site, and only move to other resources via a separate search in turn.
There’s something unique to be learned from each of these website designs, so they can help you build a great travel website of your own. Always keep in mind the purpose of the site you’re building and avoid coming up with a design that’s too similar to others.
These examples are intended to help you brainstorm for a unique and original concept. Good luck!