12 minutes
According to its international aspect and the fact that it involves online bookings, tourism is necessarily one of the most powerful business sectors on the internet.
Airbnb is the world leader of holiday rentals and Booking’s turnover comes to $1.48 billion in the first half of 2021.
Given these figures and trends, it’s obvious that tourism professionals need to create a travel website.
If you manage a tourist or hotel establishment, here are some tips for the creation of an effective online presence.
You need to create your travel website if you manage a B&B, restaurant or cultural site. It’s essential to be present online with a tourism website.
Here are the advantages of a travel website:
Enjoy high visibility
The first objective of your tourism website is to increase your visibility. If your travel website ranks high, you will attract worldwide visitors to your website and enhance the number of customers.
It’s unusual to discover a youth hostel or tourist destination just by word of mouth, booklets, or directories. Nowadays, the first reaction of travellers who want to visit a place is to surf the internet. So, you will lose many customers who may make your place known by word of mouth if you aren’t online.
It’s only possible thanks to a great optimization and SEO of your tourism website, but don’t worry! We’ll give you more details later.
Become more professional
Nowadays, a travel website is no more superficial. It’s the norm. If you don’t have a tourism website, this may be seen as a lack of professionalism and credibility, and also discourage customers from coming and visiting you.
Moreover, a tourism website works as a business card: if a potential customer heard about your tourist destination, but they aren’t capable of finding it on the internet, they will choose another one.
A travel website makes the customer path easier. If they like your website, they will get in touch with you or call you to get more information or book.
Save time and be user-friendly
Your travel website enables users to have direct access to all the necessary information for their future stay: phone number, contact, prices, places of interest, cultural visits, restaurants, bars…
For your part, you will directly receive notifications or emails when a visitor wants to get in touch with you for booking. If users want more information by contacting you, it won’t be necessary to repeat the basic information which already are on your travel website. In this way, it will be possible to add new arguments to convince them.
To sum up, a tourism website will enable you and users to save time. ⏰
Develop your business
A travel website is currently the best way to develop your business. Catch worldwide customers, develop a sustainable and optimized brand. You will easily develop your business, become more famous and enhance your turnover.
To summarize, it’s essential to create your tourism website to exist in this competitive market. However, being a tourism professional or amateur doesn’t always go hand in hand with web design.
Don’t worry: you can create your travel website quickly.
The creation of a tourism website is very easy. So why do without it? Before starting building your tourism website, you need to develop a strategy.
Here is everything you need to know about the creation of an effective travel website: 👇
👉 Present your services
Before using a web design software, first, define all the elements of your services you want to highlight. This will enable you to think about the design and style of your tourism website according to circumstances and highlight these important elements.
Write paragraphs or think about the way you want to present your services with text, videos, images, icons, interactive platforms or clear and short basic paragraphs…
It will also determine the features you need to design your travel website, as well as the adapted web design solution.
👉 Describe the inherent information in your offer
Except getting known, the real added value of your tourism website is to give users all the necessary tools to reach you. Among these tools, there are your plans, which is the customers’ main preoccupation.
Such as for your services, define your offers and how you will introduce them to your target audience. They need to be clear, relevant, easy to read and understand.
👉 Enable your customers to get in touch with you easily for more information or a booking
Of course, such as a business card, your travel website needs to be a goldmine to get in touch with you. Therefore, think about your different contact means such as a phone number, chat, email address…
👉 Give information about the different useful links
Your tourism website may also lead to different useful links such as other pages of your website, professional pages or referent pages.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, don’t hesitate to lead users to government websites to have all the information about it and prepare their travel as easy as possible.
Oh yes, completing a website isn’t enough to create an effective travel website.
Fortunately, several solutions such as SiteW make your job easier.
It’s very easy to create a travel website with SiteW. You don’t need to be a professional web designer or an expert programmer to design a quality, user-friendly and beautiful tourism website.
To build a travel website with SiteW, follow these steps: 👇
Create your SiteW account and choose your package
You can use SiteW with your browser; that is to say, you can edit your tourism website from anywhere, just with the login details of your personal account.
Therefore, to access SiteW, you just need to create a custom account with an email address and password.
Then choose your package. You can start for free with a Starter package to familiarize yourself with our software, and then upgrade during the development of your travel website.
Choose your template
Once you have created your account, you directly start the creation of your travel website. To that end, SiteW offers you custom and ready-to-use templates so that you enjoy a useful and user-friendly basis for working.
Professional web designers created these templates, which are user-friendly and adapted to Google’s visual elements and SEO standards. To sum up, SiteW saves your time.
Customize your travel website
You can customize your template. 🎨
Thanks to the intelligent editor of SiteW, you can easily add, customize and delete elements to get a custom result.
In a few clicks, you can build your custom travel website and publish it immediately.
Once you have published your tourism website, which is ready to visit, here are key tips to optimize it perfectly and get even more results.
Here are several tips for a successful travel website.
Thanks to the three following steps for a successful tourism website, you will develop your business and increase the number of customers easily.
You don’t rank high on search results for a specific request overnight.
However, some tips will help you optimize your SEO.
Add keywords
Keywords are the basis of SEO. They are essential to enable Google to understand the subject of your website and rank it for the right requests.
To that end, your travel website needs to have texts so that Google can read them and rank the regular keywords.
First, add relevant keywords to your texts, especially geographic keywords: your country, city, neighbourhood…
Local SEO enables your tourism website to be more visible in local search results thanks to your geographical location. This type of SEO works more and more so that your travel website ranks high.
In this way, you bring added value to users and Google!
Improve your URL and tags
The URL is your website address. Tags are texts that help structure your website and serve as tags for Google: your titles, subtitles, words in bold…
These elements are almost just for Google. So, they need to be well-optimized.
To that end, create coherent and easy to remember URLs. Book a domain name and use clear and evocative titles.
Implement a link building strategy
You can implement a link building strategy thanks to the different backlinks you add to your articles or texts. This strategy enables users to browse your website easily and visit referring websites.
You can lead your visitors to the official page of the tourism office or the government website so that users access the information about your tourist destination particularities.
Optimize your images
If you optimize your images, you will enhance your SEO. To that end, you need to describe and give a title to your images with specific keywords related to your tourist destination.
Such as for a basic request on Google, your images will rank on Google Images, which is a perfect but insufficiently exploited entrance to enjoy more traffic on your tourism website.
So, don’t hesitate to use it!
Your travel website is visible and several users visited it. Congrats! 🎉
To that end, you can add the following features:
Map
It’s important to add a Map block to your travel website. It leads users to Google Maps so that they know quickly and perfectly where your destination is. Furthermore, it’s easy to add the Map block. You just need to indicate your address to show it.
Form
The Form block is essential. It enables you to add a space of exchange between you and users, which is the first objective of a tourism website.
This form will also enable you to add text fields so that your visitors ask you questions, book a stay, share their experience and give feedback.
You can add forms anywhere on your travel website and edit its fields for different uses.
Psst… The Form block also enables you to collect users’ email addresses to send newsletters to them. Useful, isn’t it?
Call-to-action buttons
Call-to-action buttons on a website are always the entrance for any action.
You can configure and customize your call-to-action button. You enable users to visit your tourism website easily and arrive at strategic pages: contact page, booking page or payment page.
Social networks
It’s possible to add the Social block to your travel website. This block will enable users to visit your social networks easily to get additional information or just to follow you.
Social networks and websites are the best current ways to enhance your visibility. So, think about developing both.
In this way, you’ll have a community who will talk about your tourism website and destination and develop your business.
Download
You can add the Download block that enables users to download a document such as a presentation flyer, a price list depending on customers’ needs, a visit card, information to complete…
Customers can download any type of document. This makes the steps between you and them easier.
Your tourism website needs to be as friendly and attractive as your tourist destination. To that end, it’s important to pay attention to your design. You don’t need to be a professional web designer to create a modern and quality design.
These blocks will enable you to transform your travel website quickly:
Images
What better way to add beautiful images of your city for your tourism website? Images are essential to enable users to look to the future.
Moreover, if you add images to your travel website, you enable users to have a comprehensive overview of your tourist destination without surfing the internet and leaving your website.
To add images to SiteW, you just need to drag and drop the Image block anywhere on your tourism website. It’ll be possible to download your images to a library to keep them in your database and place them when you want.
Videos
🎥 On SiteW, it’s also possible to add videos thanks to the Video block. If you have a camera or if you can film a short video about your tourist destination, you will be able to add it to your travel website easily.
Moreover, remember that video is the most engaging format for users. Therefore, don’t hesitate to use it!
Colours
Even if you have chosen a template, you can customize it with the colour palette.
Design a graphic charter that perfectly matches the atmosphere of your tourist destination (medieval, coloured, modern…) to give users a taste of the coming travel.
Icons
Use the Icon block for a modern and user-friendly tourism website. This free icon bank will enable you to add small graphic elements easily, customize them, and give meaning and design to your travel website.
Moreover, you can add a link to your buttons to transform them into call-to-action buttons. They are very useful for the creation of booking pages or links to social networks.
Now you know the fundamental requirements for creating a tourism website.
As any manager of tourist destinations (museum, castle, B&B, flat…) is being establishing online, if you follow these tips, you may outperform most competitors.
Have a head start on competition and create your travel website. ✈️
Last update: August 22, 2024