Many of us use the Internet to plan and organize vacations and holidays. When everything can be done online, from finding info about a certain destination to booking tickets and hotel, the companies related to travel and tourism industry are naturally taking advantage of their presence on the Web. Reaping the fruits of ever emerging Web technologies, travel businesses have a wide choice of tools to create attractive and engaging websites. In this post we will try to dissect the trends in modern travel website design and define the main features a site of a travel related company should include for the best impact.

Large-scale Professional Photographs

Most of the travel websites rely heavily on big, attractive pictures. Indeed, professional digital photos dominating a site’s main page are, by far, the most straight-forward way to convince a visitor of the destination’s or service’s appeal. Designers often apply some effects and filters to photos to achieve the best visual impact. Photographs are widely used as website backgrounds, besides flash photo slideshows can be often seen on this type of websites as well.

Paradise Travel Agency Template by FlashMint

travel-flash-template-3

Story Telling

Appeal to people’s fancy and personal values is an effective motivation and persuasion tool. The planet Earth is very beautiful and one may have hard times trying to choose a place to visit just browsing tons of attractive photos.  Whether it is narrative or visual, interesting story that involves a website visitor into the ambiance of the presented destination, is a great way to grab the visitor’s attention and make them choose you.

Michelberg Hotel

michelberg-hotel

Subtle jQuery Interactivity

Smooth jQuery-based elements are often used on websites related to tourism and resort industry because of the unobtrusive interactivity they provide. jQuery components don’t require much time to load yet make a website browsing experience more exciting.

Alaska Zipline Adventures
alaska-zipline

Social Media

The importance of the social media integration can be hardly overrated today. While developing a website for travel agency, hotel or resort, be sure to make the links to social networks and bookmaking websites prominent so that people who have visited the presented destination could easily share their impressions, pictures and recommendations with their friends on Facebook, Tiwtter, Flickr and other major social sites.

Visit Norway

visit-norway

Incredible Flash Effects

Many travel websites combine static structure with dynamic Flash effects. Fancy Flash photo gallery or video on the main page can do a great job attracting the visitors’ attention. Flash is also the perfect tool to create a specific promotional campaign for some resort or place of interest. On some websites featured in the showcase below you can see incredible 3D effects and animations that can be implemented with Flash only. By means of these effects a simple website becomes a mind-blowing virtual journey that delivers a really special experience to the site visitors.

Travel Operator by FlashMint

travel-flash-template-1

Examples of beautiful and creative travel website design

Asturias

asturias

Costa Navarino

costa-navarino

Aerial View Tour of New York City

new-york

Lascaux

lascaux

The Really Wild Travel Company

the-really-wild-travel-comp

Summit Hotels

summit-hotels

Travel Company Template by FlashMint

travel-flash-template2

Lake Nona

lake-nona

Utah Travel

utah

Island of Rab

island-of-rab

Delia Explorers

delia-explorers

Snapshots of Provence

snapshots-of-provence

Clover Cottage

clover-cottage

Cathedral Mountain Lodge

cathedral-mountain-lodge

Alpine Meadows

alpine-meadows

CantoBelo

canto-belo

The Bahamas

bahamas

Information about Australian holidays and Travel

australia

If you are working on a design of a website for a travel company, hotel or resort organization, remember FlashMint is a good place to start. Trendy Flash templates and jQuery components can be a great base for a successful website of this kind.

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5 Responses to “Travel Industry Websites: Design Trends and Best Examples”

  1. Good interesting and informative Site! Keep up the good work! Will return back again. Check out my site too! http://singaporeitinerary.blogspot.com ! Cheers!

  2. Andre says:

    I am new to Travel Industry websites. I want a nature Travel Industry website for Southern Africa. A very similar website to http://www.stayz.com.au including booking engines. Please also look at (www.bookit.com.au) (www.booking.com) (www.safarinow.com). The website must be very eye-catching, interactive, dynamic, clean with simple navigation, I would like a very user friendly interface and layout that allows users to search rental accommodation very easily. I find that stayz.com.au is a bit complicated in their front page design.
    http://www.stayz.com.au is a website that allows property owners to list their properties for holiday rental. It has a contact management database integrated with its calendaring and booking service. It also has an email and payments management system integrated – it’s like a mini CRM for property owners.
    Required Skills:
    Knowledge of SQL Server 2005/2008 R2 Understanding of data schema design and optimization .Net 4 C# good experience of the language, the base libraries and OO design generally Good knowledge and understanding of Linq Asp.Net 4.0 web forms – extensive knowledge required JQuery and plugins HTML 4 / CSS 2 – good working knowledge JSON, and client side programming

    Advantageous:
    Asp.Net MVC HTML 5 / CSS 3 Experience of developing for mobile
    - I am ideally seeking professionals with good English communication skills
    - The branding/logo of new website
    - Successful experience in eCommerce interface design is important
    - Up-to-date knowledge of web development trends and understanding of technology used in designing interactively
    - To be proficient in a vector and bitmap graphics package, and very familiar with CSS design concepts and best practices
    - An ability to interpret business and user requirements into intuitive and logical interface design
    - Desktop browser and mobile experience
    - Must be link to facebook, twitter, yahoo, email, google, bing, youtube, and skype (Share With Friends) (Bookmark & Share), Tripadvisor
    - It must be a VERY quick loading website

    - Website MUST be designed with SEO MAXIMIZATION in mind (Top search rankings and sponsored positions on Google) All pages fully optimized for all the major search engines.

    - Reference to site that u have done

    - PLEASE only respond if you have had EXPERIENCE in this type of website development
    - Quote for total completed job (Fixed Price Quote), no other price will be accepted after we both agree on a price
    - Time required to analyze and complete the website

  3. hi…im fiza from Malaysia….i just want to give some tips or my opinon regarding this blog which is for me i’m always been surfing on a website that has a lot information about travelling from all the country. I love to give just a little bit my own opinion regarding the website after i view with my brother. For me, there has a little bit problem regarding the size of your image or graphics that u put. it doesn’t look likes make a difference. You better put the big one of the picture than its can be more easier to people to view of the content and so on. The larger you can go, the better. So it may be wise to make sure that your advertisers within your site, have the largest graphic visible to the eye to gain the most exposure for your advertisers as possible.If you don’t have advertisers on your site don’t worry. Try to implement large images for your company’s services and specials. Please also keep in mind that not everyone is on high speed internet or cable. Make sure to test your site for download speeds and keep your download time to a minimal. You don’t want to lose your visitors because it took more than a minute to download one page. other than that, the content are very good because its very related with the want the traveler wants which is we can get all the information about the best in Australia and everything including the flight, accommodation,food and transportation.:-)tq..

  4. Alice says:

    Interesting to see how travel website design has changed. We have built a few travel websites and done write ups of them, we’d be interested to hear what people think: http://www.wiredcanvas.com/portfolio/travel-website-design/

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