More often than not, your travel website is literally the face of your business. Travelers will form an impression of your travel brand and decide whether or not they can trust you based on their experience browsing your website.
Trust is therefore important for your travel website to inspire. Because travelers spend a great deal of time and financial resources researching and planning a trip, they need to feel confident enough in your offering to want to convert that into a booking.
Your travel website also needs to be engaging and easy to use otherwise travelers are not likely to spend much time on it. This is why it is important for you to have a website that inspires travelers and is thoughtfully put together for the optimal user experience.
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Luckily, building a great travel website no longer needs to be a costly and time-consuming endeavor that requires a skilled developer or designer to spend a great deal of time and money on putting it together for you.
There are a number of free and paid travel website templates available online for download that can be populated with your information to give you an amazing travel website in the space of a few hours.
This can either be done by a developer or designer in a fraction of the time it would take to build a website from scratch or alternatively if you have the relevant skills you may be able to do it yourself.
If like many people you have used a tool to build your travel website, such as WordPress, Wix, Weebly or Squarespace, then remember that your template needs to be compatible with it. Your template also needs to be optimized for viewing across desktop, tablet and mobile platforms so that travelers are able to access your website regardless of where they are.
Here are some ideas of what to look out for when choosing a suitable travel website template for your travel business.
You may be surprised to hear that there are some eye-catching, high-quality free templates you can use to create your travel website. They may not be as customizable or as unique as paid templates, but for the most part free does not necessarily mean a compromise on quality.
The template you choose will depend on what type of travel business yours is, and its needs from a website.
This template by Colorlib is ideal for an Online Travel Agency (OTA) business, or one that offers a mix of bookable items such as flights, accommodation, hotels, experiences etc.
The template greets visitors to the site with a large, captivating image. The menu at the top is static so that travelers can navigate easily between the different search categories.
It uses thumbnail imagery for each item that can be purchased on the site and can be viewed across desktop, tablet, and mobile platforms allowing travelers to browse and book from their preferred medium.
There is also a review section, and a most popular section, as well as a blog. At the bottom of the page are the contact details and social media links.
A subscribe to our newsletter CTA box is present so that you can collect information from your site visitors, and the entire website template is designed to let travelers explore the rich content you hold.
This template from Just Free Themes offers a good solution for travel businesses who focus on destinations or experiences.
The carousel image that greets travelers on the home page is large enough to attract attention and gives you the chance to showcase your best images. The call to action button situated on the main image area allows travelers to immediately find out more or make a booking.
The template allows you to group your offering according to destinations or tours, and just about every section provides information and booking buttons so that travelers can easily process their requests without having to navigate to a separate booking page.
Also important is the gallery, meet the team, and what travelers say about us sections. They allow your travel business to establish trust with travelers as they can review opinions of your travel offering, find out more about the people offering the experience, and most importantly, see images to find out what to expect from their booking.
Paid or premium travel website templates will often add an extra layer of functionality, be more unique, have more features, and offer better developer support than free versions do. They are also updated more frequently which makes for an optimal user experience on your website.
You can see from this premium yoga website template how many extra features the paid versions often contain. In addition to the usual features you would expect to find, there are a greater number of connected pages, a wide range of elements such widgets, sliders, toggle boxes, and image effects, as well as an online shop available on this template.
Aesthetically speaking there is lots of white space and the widely spaced text boxes, large images, and font make for an optimal visual experience on this website template.
This paid template comes with a number of niche layouts which provide further customization within it.
While you do not want to be constantly reinventing your website with new formats as this may cause your clients to fail to recognize your brand, the benefit of having multiple layouts to choose from lies in the freedom it gives to select the best page templates to make up your website.
The animated homepage photo provides the website template with a unique and immersive feel to it and is certainly effective in capturing the interest of a website visitor.
The effect is to create a real-life view and make the traveler feel like they are already present at the place depicted in the animated photo.
Once you have carefully considered a number of travel website templates and made your selection, it is time to set it up and populate your content.
Regardless of whether you opt for a free or paid version, there are a number of basic features that should be included on your travel website.
This will vary according to the context of your travel business, but make sure to include high-quality imagery, rich informational content related to your travel offering, maps and guides, contact information, location, how to get there, as well as relevant tips specific to your local area.
