In this digitally-developed world, you can do almost anything online. Speaking of anything, running a fully-fledged travel business is undoubtedly one of those options.
If you run a travel or tour agency, it is imperative for you to have a solid online presence. Travel enthusiasts are busy looking for new adventures and packages online every day. Having a fully functional travel website with all crucial features intact surely makes you their priority.
So what are the key features of your travel agency website?
Well, first of all, you need a website that operates smoothly across all devices and screen types. With a responsive and mobile-friendly design, you can direct more visitors to your website. As long as you can do this, you won’t even know when your visitors turn into your customers.
Now that they are on your website, what do they look for? Undoubtedly, the most pleasant and intuitive way to book different travel packages offered by your company.
So, setting up a smart booking system with varied payment options and unlimited trip packages is almost mandatory. It not only eases up the work for your visitors but also helps you increase your business impression.
We may have given a sneak peek at some of the important features of travel agency websites, but that’s not all! In this article, you can explore the 19 must-have features for travel agency websites.
Let’s get underway!
Table of Contents
List of Must-Have Features For Travel Agency Websites
Whenever you design a travel website, you should keep these three things in mind — functionality, aesthetics, and user experience. From responsive design to innovative booking systems, here are the 19 must-have features for travel agency websites:
1. Responsive & Mobile-Friendly Design
Whether you run a travel agency website or any other kind of website, responsiveness and mobile-friendliness are the two most crucial features to consider.
The research done by Statista states that about half (50%) of internet traffic comes from mobile devices. Considering these stats, you should make sure that your travel website is fully compatible with mobile phones to increase your website’s traffic and boost your travel business.
If your visitors find any disturbances and disbalance in the performance while surfing your website, they are prone to leave your website and look for other options. This can end up costing you potential customers and potential income as well.
As a result, you have to ensure that your website is responsive across all devices and screen sizes. It should offer a dynamic integration and aesthetics with handheld devices, laptops, and desktops.
To make sure your travel agency website is responsive, you need to pick the best WordPress themes like Travel Booking Pro to design your website. This theme adjusts the resolution of your website to suit different sizes of different devices. Similarly, it also facilitates your users to experience the same interface across all platforms.
A mobile-responsive feature of your travel agency website ensures:
- Increased visibility and higher ranks on search engines
- A better user experience
- Increased conversion rates
2. SEO Friendliness
Like responsive design, SEO optimization is another key factor for every successful website. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) denotes the process of driving traffic from the free, organic, editorial, or natural search results on search engines. It plays a significant role in increasing the quantity and quality of the global traffic to your website via organic search results.
The stats based on the research by Brafton claims that 95% of search engine traffic goes to the pages that get displayed on the first page. It means that if you can rank your travel website on Google’s first page, it is likely to receive 95% of clicks. The increased Click Through Rate (CTR) means more traffic, and more traffic means an increased opportunity for you to scale your travel business.
If online travel enthusiasts can easily find your travel agency website on search engines like Google, they are likely to book trips from you. This way, you stay ahead of your competitors and make more income in the process. To ensure your website is SEO-friendly, always design a website using SEO-friendly WordPress themes.
To know more about SEO for a better Travel website, we have created a checklist. Make sure to check them out too.
3. Smart Booking Process
Your travel website should be made in such a way that your customers don’t have to break much sweat while booking their favorite adventure. Having a booking system with an intuitive design and a simple user interface is a must to excel in your business.
The booking system of your website should include all the information related to the destination, check-in and check-out days, contact, and extra travel-related details.
There are many benefits of an online smart booking system which makes it a must-have feature for a travel agency website.
4. Unlimited Travel Packages
As a travel website, you need to present limitless options to your visitors. Whenever they explore your website, they should be able to see hundreds and thousands of travel packages. If you offer more options, you automatically increase your chances of landing more sales and conversions.
For this, you need a WordPress plugin that lets you add an unlimited number of trips like the WP Travel Engine. Using this WordPress plugin, you can easily include a trip, trip gallery, descriptions, day-to-day itinerary, regular price, sales price, duration, trip facts, FAQs, as well as the includes and excludes section.
As your potential clients visit your website and find this sort of detailed information, they become more attracted to your services.
You should always be careful about your website’s navigation structure as it has a huge impact on conversions, sales, and bounce rates. If your users find it difficult to navigate through your travel website, they will leave.
That’s the last thing you want as you are looking to boost your travel business. That’s why it is necessary to create clear, hierarchical website navigation that allows your visitors to find what they want instantly.
For instance, you can create a proper section for different travel packages available in your travel agency. You can organize those packages based on destinations, activities, types, and make them easily navigable through your website’s homepage.
6. Itinerary Downloader
It’s difficult to be constantly online while traveling. In fact, most remote places have minimal or zero access to the internet. As a result, it could be difficult for a traveler to stay online to get updates about the trip itinerary and other important details.
As a result, having a travel website with the Itinerary Downloader feature is a must. Thankfully, some plugins allow you to generate the itinerary PDF and include different trip content to create an offline trip detail brochure file. This helps your customers to get updated and plan every moment of their trip without the need for the internet.
This feature makes it easier to get quick details about the trip without the need to reach the website online. Your users can easily download the trip details, including different sections like trip overview, trip cost, trip availability, trip itinerary, trip facts, FAQs, quick contact details, and much more.
Once the itinerary PDF is generated, it can be easily accessed through smartphones.
7. Clear Pricings
If the pricing of different travel packages is not clear on your travel agency website, there is a high chance of your potential customers spending money somewhere else. You need to keep in mind that nothing makes a visitor bounce quicker than unexpected tax and charges.
As a result, you need to present a simple and clear pricing table on your website so that your users can choose the appropriate travel packages. The pricing table shouldn’t offer too much or too little but just the right amount of information for them to differentiate between the packages.
8. Group Discount
You can also include a feature like a group discount to attract more customers to your travel agency. If a particular set of customers book for a group trip, you can provide them with a reasonable discount and encourage them to book trips from you in the future.
For instance, if the cost per traveler for a single traveler is $1000, you can make it $900 for two travelers and around $800 for three or more travelers. This way you can get more group bookings in the future which increases your earning opportunities.
9. Effective Payment Integration
If you want your visitors to purchase any travel services from your website, you need to offer them a plethora of payment options as possible. As most travelers possess multiple credit, debit, bank, and prepaid cards, offering them well-integrated and user-friendly payment methods helps you to cement long-term business relationships.
Luckily, with travel plugins, you can integrate different payment methods on your website. For instance, you can integrate the PayPal Express Checkout Payment Gateway extension that allows you to accept trip payments through PayPal Express.
Similarly, it lets you add other payment methods like Stripe, PayUMoney, PayHere, Authorize.net, PayU Biz, PayFast, Midtrans, and so on.
Are you wondering how to integrate a payment gateway into your travel website? Check out this detailed guide.
10. Effective and Straightforward Search Filters
Your website should include effective and straightforward search filters so that your customers can easily get what they are looking for. As a travel operator, you can include different parameters for filtering on your website, including location, trip date, price per night, and more.
11. Predictive Search
In this modern world, travelers demand efficiency and speed from travel websites, and predictive search is one big factor that boosts your efficiency.
To be precise, a predictive search is nothing but a drop-down list of the possible suggestions that pop up immediately while typing. If your website includes the predictive search feature, your visitors won’t have to type the full name of the travel package or destination. They can simply enter the first couple of words and get the possible suggestions that match their query.
Predictive search can be an excellent way to avoid displaying a huge list of results so that your visitors can instantly find what they are looking for. Especially if your users are viewing your website on a mobile platform, predictive search capabilities ease up their experience and save them enough time.
12. Trip Weather Forecast
When you plan a trip to a particular destination, the weather is the first thing that you need to keep in mind. Your trip won’t be interesting anymore if you get hit by an unexpected rain or storm.
Having a proper travel website with a trip weather forecast feature can help your travelers plan their adventures perfectly. This feature enables your customers to select their preferred weather location from different locations around the globe.
The tool also displays different weather conditions like current temperature, humidity, wind, pressure, UV index, and the sunrise and sunset time for the location.
Similarly, your users can also get hourly forecasts and daily forecasts which assist them in planning their trip accordingly.
13. Booking Details & Email Notification
It is always essential to keep track of information when you own a particular business. As a travel agency, it becomes important for you to save all the booking information that you land on each day. With the right use of WordPress themes and plugins, you can easily store information related to booking along with the details of your customers on your website.
Similarly, you should be able to provide email notifications to your customers whenever they book a trip from your website. Also, this feature makes sure that you too receive an email alert with all the booking details each time your customer books a travel package.
14. Informative Destination and Activities Pages
Your travel website should feature a number of informative and interactive pages to keep your visitors engaged. For instance, you should create destination pages with the name of countries and cities.
You can create a destination page named Bali. Now, whenever a traveler visits the particular destination page (i.e., Bali), they can see all the trips that belong to that particular destination.
Similarly, you should create different activities pages like hiking, skiing, sightseeing tours, and mountain biking to engage your visitors. After that, you can connect different trips to these fun activities. Now, whenever clients visit your website, they can catch various activities and all the trips in one place.
15. Google Map Integration
Google Maps is an excellent tool to boost your customer’s engagement to your travel website. If you can incorporate Google Maps into your travel website, it becomes easier for visitors to look for the areas and interests surrounding their destination. With that, you get the best chance to land more bookings through your travel agency website.
It will be more convincing for your visitors if they can see available trips and holidays laid out on an interactive map with the details of the destination along with a stunning image.
16. Beautiful Images
Images and pictures often tell untold stories. They have the power to inspire and transmit messages much quicker than plain texts. While images and visuals are important for almost all kinds of websites, they are absolutely mandatory for travel websites.
In the travel industry, customers engage with travel websites for the content and for their service. Incorporating compelling images, photos, visuals, and graphics can assist you in keeping them engaged on your website. Besides, images somewhat help you to increase your brand and business loyalty.
Not just that, if you include attractive images of specific locations with your trip packages, your customers find them convincing. As a result, you can see a significant rise in your travel bookings.
In case you are wondering how to include alluring and royalty-free images on your travel website, check out this article on 20+ Best Stock Photos Sites For Royalty Free Travel Images.
17. Social Media Integration
With the current digital marketing evolution, social media has become one of the principal marketing channels. Whether you own a travel website or any website of any other niches, you need social media to promote your respective business.
As per the study carried by Statista, about 43% of internet users use social networks to research products and services online. Subsequently, social media is an effective way to stay connected with your potential customers and make them consistent contributors to your business.
Travelers often prefer to share their adventure experiences on social platforms. Besides, they love to make recommendations and even interact with each other via social platforms. Having a website integrated into social media platforms helps you to keep your visitors engaged with your business.
Whenever you design a website for your travel agency, you need to make sure that the theme you use includes social media integration. You should be able to place links to your social media accounts like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter on noticeable areas of your website. The social media integration feature is the crucial driver for customer engagement and online reputation management strategy.
18. Extra Services
You require the extra services feature on your travel agency website to add additional services for travel packages. Using this, you can add services like airport pick-up, hotel drop-off, and vehicle rentals to the trips on your website.
While creating different travel packages, you can mention the additional services and their rates as well. Later, when your customers visit your website to book a trip, they can book the package along with extra services at a specific additional cost.
19. Testimonials and Customer Reviews
Customer reviews and testimonials can definitely help you to scale your travel business. The wealth of information available to travelers in modern times makes the transparency of information regarding travel experiences a key growth factor. It helps to build a comfortable environment for your growing customers.
An ideal travel website is one that develops trust in the business among potential clients. Having a separate section on your website with positive reviews about your travel agency’s operation boots reliability and drives more customers towards your business. Besides, it is always handy to utilize your client’s feedback and improve your company’s functionalities and services.
Whenever you create a website for your travel agency, you need to make sure that the theme you choose supports the reviews/testimonials section. Having a little online community of your own helps you to increase customer engagement and scale your travel business.
Our Top 5 Features For Travel Agency Websites
As long as you are in the travel business, having a proper online portfolio is a must. A well-designed and feature-rich travel website helps you keep your strong online presence. Besides, it eases up your business operation and assists you in scaling your business as a whole.
All of the 19 features mentioned in this review are undoubtedly beneficial for a travel agency website. However, if we have to pick the top five among them, we choose:
- Responsive & Mobile-Friendly Design
- Smart Booking Process
- Effective Payment Integration
- Google Map Integration
- Testimonials and Customer Review
As about half of internet traffic comes from mobile devices, creating a fully responsive and mobile-friendly website is a must. Your users should be able to check out your travel services without any disturbances from all browsing devices and screen types like smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops.
Similarly, it is very important for your website to possess a smart booking system. The booking system should make sure that the price adjusts automatically based on the number of people selected for booking. Besides, the booking form should just include mandatory fields to make sure the booking process is faster and easier.
Along with an efficient booking system, your website should provide a wide range of payment options. Some of the payment integrations that you can add to your travel website are PayPal Express, Stripe, PayU Money, PayHere, Authorize.net, PayU Biz, and so on.
Next up, Google Maps can help you boost your customer’s engagement to your travel website. Once you integrate Google Maps, it becomes easier for your visitors to look for the areas and interests surrounding their destination. With that, you can land more bookings through your travel agency website.
On top of that, your website should display testimonials and reviews from your happy customers to scale your travel business. Having a separate section on your website with positive reviews about your travel agency’s operation encourages more customers to sign up for their travel plans from your website. Besides, the client’s feedback can be quite handy to improve your company’s functionalities and services accordingly.
Thankfully, the WP Travel Engine plugin includes all of these key features to let you create a well-organized website for your travel agency.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What should a travel website have?
You can call your travel website ideal if it includes:
• Information about different travel and trip packages
• Compelling and high-quality images
• A brief summary of different trips
• Clear and accurate itineraries and facts
• Maps and guides
• Information about transportation
• Hotel recommendations with links to hotel and booking websites
• Intuitive booking system with a plethora of payment options
Do WordPress themes and plugins impact the functionality of the travel website?
Yes, they do! In fact, WordPress themes make sure that your travel website has a responsive layout and all the necessary features needed for a smooth operation. If you select the best WordPress theme, it helps you improve your travel website’s visibility on search engines, which automatically boosts your company’s sales.
Similarly, the best travel plugins offer you the functionalities like an intuitive booking and reservation system, Google Map integration, different payment integration, and much more. In short, WordPress plugins help amplify your website’s serviceability.
Why do travel agencies use the online reservation system?
Travel enthusiasts often have a knack for booking their favorite travel packages at the last moment. As a result, it won’t be possible for everyone to visit the travel agency in order to book a trip. Therefore, travel agencies should include an online reservation system to ease the clients’ booking and reservation process.
Having a travel website with a smart booking system and proper payment integration eases up the online booking process for travel agencies.
To Sum Up
With the competitiveness that the travel business possesses, you should make sure that you have done all the homework to make your company stand out among the rest. That’s why having a proper travel agency website with easy access to your services is a must.
When you design a travel website for your travel agency, you should make sure that it has almost every feature that we mentioned in this article. A responsive and modern design with a smart booking system and helpful customer reviews is what makes a website scalable.
Make sure that your travel agency website has all these 19 must-have features. If we have missed any important ones, do remind us in the comments section below.
