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Stunning Travel Website Design Examples

Explore mesmerizing travel website design examples. get inspired by stunning layouts and features for your next travel project..

Imagine this: you’re planning the ultimate getaway. Where do you start? Likely a travel website with a jaw-dropping design that instantly whisks you into a world of wanderlust. That’s the magic of stellar travel website design— it’s your digital passport to anywhere.

In an online ocean of getaways and retreats, exceptional design sets the stars apart from the sea of sameness. It’s not just about pretty pictures; it’s about crafting a  user experience  that feels like the start of a vacation.

Like the allure of hidden travel gems, this article uncovers the art behind travel website design examples that evoke the spirit of adventure.

You’re about to embark on a journey through the ins and outs of  interactive website features , and the secret ingredients to creating an online platform that’s a direct boarding pass to your audience’s heart. Buckle up, we’re about to take off into the world where design meets destination.

By the end, you’ll wield the power to turn the ordinary into wanderlust-worthy experiences!

Travel Website Design Examples To Check Out

Travel agency card slider.

This elegantly contemporary card slider template for Slider Revolution is designed to elevate your travel blog or travel booking website beyond your aspirations.

Travel Blog Carousel

This travel blog template boasts enthralling parallax and Ken Burns effects, offering a deep, immersive experience. The depth and gentle effects augment the design’s overall ambiance.

Portal Effect Hero Slider

Whether you’re aiming for a stunning landing page or an eye-catching product showcase on your WordPress website, this hero slider module with a portal effect is equipped to yield outstanding outcomes. Its striking design renders it versatile for any section of your travel site.

Cinematic Wildlife Slider

This photography-centric slider allows you to seamlessly craft cinematic displays. It comes equipped with an easy-to-use YouTube video popup feature for enhanced functionality.

Sensei Lana’i

Dive into the serene vibe of Sensei Lana’i, where the art of wellbeing takes center stage. Imagine a digital canvas painted with tropical backdrops and wellness itineraries, all woven into the sleek user experience of their site. The  web design  echoes the tranquility of their retreats.

Think minimalist chic with an emphasis on blissful journeys, blending interactive maps with easy  booking system  navigation. It’s a stopover for the soul with intuitive paths leading to personalized wellness experiences.

Greaves India

Escape into the heart of India with Greaves India’s digital portal. Their  travel website design  offers a tapestry of vibrant colors and immersive  interactive maps , guaranteeing a seamless scroll toward your next adventure.

Custom travel itineraries beckon, with user-friendly tools that curate your personal  Indian odyssey.  Discover the lands through their destination galleries; it’s not just a website, it’s a window into the soul of India.

Spice Island Beach Resort

Stroll through the digital isles of Spice Island Beach Resort, where salty sea air seems to waft from your screen. This  travel portal  radiates warmth and luxury, decked with high-res  destination galleries  and responsive elements that make planning a breeze.

Picture yourself sipping a cool drink, itinerary already smooth-sailing thanks to their intuitive  booking system . It’s a slice of paradise at your fingertips.

Ikos Oceania

Bask in the Grecian sun through Ikos Oceania’s digital window. Their  responsive design  reflects the elegance of Mediterranean leisure. With each click, envision bespoke holiday-making with  interactive maps  and  travel portal development  that guides you from room selections to secluded bays. The  user-friendly navigation  promises a journey as serene as the Aegean coast itself.

Ventana Big Sur

Ventana Big Sur’s online presence is an ode to the rugged Californian coast. With a whisper of coastal winds in its  web design , the site takes you on a visual hike through Big Sur’s wonder. 

Responsive design  ensures you’re booking your cliff-side retreat as effortlessly as the local condors soar, with  tourism website templates  that invite endless exploration. This digital space is where luxury meets the untamed Pacific.

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Ah, the land Down Under, and AHOTELs’ online spot captures its spirit. A digital doorway to Aussie hospitality, the site’s  travel website design  features  responsive elements  and easy navigation to book your city escape or beachside holiday. Their  travel deals and offers section  is a jackpot for deals. From the Outback to the Opera House, your Australian adventure starts with a click.

David Copperfield’s: Musha Cay

Magic isn’t just for the stage, it’s on full display at David Copperfield’s Musha Cay. Scroll through and let the illusion of floating villas and azure seas spellbind you. The  travel website’s design  is a masterclass in enchantment, providing a user experience that rivals the resort’s allure. With their sophisticated imagery and smooth  booking system interface , your island fantasy is just a few clicks from reality.

Turneffe Island Resort

Ever wondered what it’s like to get lost in oceanic bliss? Enter Turneffe Island Resort’s online haven. The  responsive design  caters to your every whim on-the-go, showcasing Belize’s best with  multilingual support  and vivid destination imagery. It’s your digital dive into the Blue Hole – the site’s a gateway to underwater majesties and surface-level luxuries.

Let’s talk about the powerhouse, Expedia – the globetrotter’s toolbox. This site has it all. Flights? Check. Hotels? Double check. Cars, cruises, you name it. Navigation’s a cinch, with a myriad of options at your fingertips. Deals pop up left and right, and with that  online booking engine , your vacation is practically booking itself. Dream it, then do it with Expedia.

Sail through Goolets’ website, an ode to the sea and the luxury of gulet cruises. Its slick  travel portal development  pulls you into a world of exclusive voyages and hidden coves. Each page turn feels like a gentle sea breeze, with  responsive design  ensuring smooth sailing. Picture sumptuous decks, and their site’s the compass guiding you there.

Casa Angelina

Casa Angelina’s site is a minimalist manifesto to the Amalfi Coast’s charms. With pristine whites and deep blues, it’s pure visual poetry. Navigate through their offers with elegance, just as you’d wander their chic corridors.  Responsive design  paired with  luxury travel content  makes booking your Italian idyll as leisurely as lounging on their terraces, gazing at the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Descartes Private Experience

Descartes Private Experience serves up a smorgasbord of opulence, privacy, and tailor-made travels. Their  multilingual travel website  dazzles with its array of luxe locales and personal touches. Here,  user experience (UX)  is king, guiding you through bespoke offerings with interactive elements that whisper, “Your wish is our command.” It’s sophistication, digitized.

Bulgari Hotels & Resorts

In the realm of luxury, Bulgari stands tall, and their digital presence is no different. Crisp, clean, with an Italian flair – the website flaunts elegance from every pixel. It’s all about the  user experience , with smooth transitions that are as polished as their diamond collections.  Responsive design  makes indulgence accessible, whether on desktop or mobile. Step into their world of sumptuous comfort, where every click brings you closer to a stay replete with refinement.

Calabash Cove Resort & Spa

Meet Calabash Cove Resort & Spa, a virtual gateway to tropical relaxation and Caribbean charms. With a design as breezy as island winds, the site invites you on a journey through picture-perfect views and seamless  booking system integration . It’s a  travel portal  that balances visual appeal with  mobile compatibility , ensuring your transition from daydreaming browser to beachside lounger is as tranquil as their cove’s clear waters.

Hop into the innovative world of Seat Frog where snagging an upgrade is as easy as a tap on your screen. The design? It’s smart, cool, and intuitive. Just like having a concierge in your pocket, the site’s  travel portal  delivers last-minute luxury to your next train trip or flight. Their  mobile-compatible  platform is all about spontaneous elevation – because let’s face it, who doesn’t love a surprise upgrade?

Museum Hotel

The Museum Hotel – a storied trove nestled in the rich landscape of Cappadocia. The website mirrors the uniqueness of its locale; historical splendor meets modern flair.  Responsive design  brings age-old frescoes into sharp relief, while the  booking system interface  is a work of art in itself, framing your next cultural escapade with effortless style. This is where heritage and hospitality converge, created for the modern traveller with a taste for the extraordinary.

Nira Alpina

Witness the allure of the Swiss Alps through the window of Nira Alpina’s website – a showcase of alpine chic and  responsive web design . Here, the peaks call out to the adventurer, and the site echoes with that call to action, offering a straightforward path to booking your mountain retreat. With  travel portal features  echoing the crisp air and luxury of sweeping snowscapes, it’s your high-altitude passport to an alpine idyll.

Soak in the Italian Lake District’s serenity at the cozy escape that is Quellenhof. The site’s canvas splashes warm hospitality across each page with a  responsive, user-friendly design . Tranquility breathes through the screen as you navigate through lush garden images and inviting spa scenes. A streamlined  online booking gateway  ensures you’re only a click away from your Lake Garda getaway.

All aboard Y.CO – the pinnacle of maritime luxury and your digital captain to the finest yacht charters. With an immersive  travel website design , the platform is a virtual vessel steering you to the oceans’ elite experiences. The  booking system  is built for the smoothest of sailors, while  interactive maps  chart a course to your personalized seaside sojourn. It’s the ultimate site for those with nautical inclinations and a taste for the high seas.

Baita Valon

Baita Valon is your alpine digital refuge, where rustic charm and modern tech blend seamlessly. The  responsive web design  invites nature lovers and solitude seekers to a virtual hut getaway in the heart of the Italian Alps. Discover quaint comfort and explore high-altitude adventures, as the  user-friendly navigation  guides you through a bevy of outdoor experiences. It’s your call to the wild, wrapped in a cozy online experience.

Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet isn’t merely a travel site, it’s an atlas for the curious and the bold. Filled with rich content, it’s your go-to for globetrotting wisdom. The website is a treasure trove of travel guides, tips, and itineraries, packed in a  responsive design . With user-generated reviews and expert advice just a click away, it’s like having a seasoned adventurer in your back pocket.

Pitch Luxury Tents

Whisk away to the simplicity of the great outdoors with Pitch Luxury Tents. Their site is a canvas for the imagination, deftly painted with the prospects of glamping amidst the UK’s picturesque settings. Here,  luxe outdoor accommodations  marry the site’s intuitive  booking system integration . A getaway under the stars is effortlessly within reach, with boutique options that resonate with the modern camper’s quest for a chic outdoor experience.

Knai Bang Chatt

At Knai Bang Chatt, the essence of coastal Cambodia comes to life with just a few scrolls. Picture a digital front that’s as calm as the Gulf of Thailand, their  responsive site design  matching the vibe of their seafront escape. It’s a cinch to navigate through luxurious room selections to tailored wellness experiences. This site doesn’t just advertise a stay; it transports you, with a  seamless booking system  ensuring your journey’s as smooth as the sands.

Turtle Island

Fiji’s jewel, Turtle Island, presents an online oasis reflecting the tranquility of its turquoise waters. The  travel website’s design  extends a warm Bula inviting you to dive into a virtual vacation. Dream up your ideal getaway with the help of their  interactive maps  and ambient visuals. It’s not just about making a booking; it’s about beginning an escapade, and their  e-commerce features  cater to everything from your journey to your island wardrobe.

Onyx CenterSource

Navigate the world of B2B payments in the travel industry with Onyx CenterSource. Their  web design  speaks to a professional audience, prioritizing functionality with a high level of  user experience  focus. Streamlined and secure, this digital platform is a cornerstone for hotels and travel agencies alike. A  mobile-compatible  hub serving payment solutions, Onyx is the behind-the-scenes hero for seamless travel operations.

Embark on a digital hike through the Rockies with Go Breck. The site sets the stage for adventure with its rich array of  travel content and guides . Ideal for planning a mountain getaway, the  responsive design  mimics the openness of the wilderness, offering a portal to vacation rentals, local events, and unbeatable trails.  User-friendly navigation  aids in whisking you away to this high-altitude paradise.

One&Only Reethi Rah

Step into One&Only Reethi Rah’s website, and you’ve stepped onto a Maldivian atoll. With swaying palms and pristine beaches framing every page, the  UX  is as luxe and inviting as the villas dotting their atoll. Their  interactive booking system  is your first-class ticket to a paradise where indulgence and isolation dance hand in hand, crafted for the discerning traveler in mind.

Hotel Frida By The Forest

Hotel Frida By The Forest invites you to immerse in the tranquility of nature’s embrace. Its digital presence is a fresh breath of alpine air, combining the charm of a woodland retreat with sleek,  modern web design .  Online booking  is effortless, mirroring the peace found within their forested haven. This site doesn’t just showcase a hotel; it’s an invitation to disconnect in a haven cradled by trees.

The Leading Hotels of the World (LHW) curates an exceptional collection of properties, each jewel presented elegantly through their sophisticated site. The  user-friendly interface  spotlights each destination with flair, employing  interactive maps  to explore global locales.  Online payment gateways  and concierge services are woven into their design, ensuring a blueprint for your premium stay is at your fingertips.

COCOS Hotel Antigua Resort

Imagine a digital footprint in the sand leading to COCOS Hotel Antigua Resort. Their web design exudes the allure of the Caribbean with an intuitive play on  responsive design  and alluring visuals. It’s a symphony of user-friendly navigation and immersive visuals. Their  online booking system  echoes the personalized service you’d expect from a boutique island resort. It’s a splash of sunshine before the real rays hit your skin.

Telluride, Colorado

Telluride’s website is your roadmap to this high-alpine town’s year-round glory. Organized yet adventurous, its  responsive design  aids travellers in pinpointing their perfect mountain experience, be it winter skiing or summer festivals.  Travel guides  and must-see spots are readily accessible, making for an exemplary  user experience . Here, your Colorado dream starts to take shape against the backdrop of majestic peaks.

Villa Feltrinelli

Villa Feltrinelli’s site whispers historic romance on the shores of Lake Garda. With a  travel website design  reminiscent of Italian grandeur, it speaks to those seeking a vacation steeped in opulence. The  booking system  interface lets you reserve a piece of history effortlessly. It’s a lookbook of yesteryear charm, inviting you to walk in the footsteps of poets and nobility.

Relais Toscana

Submerge into the heart of Tuscany with Relais Toscana. Here, understated elegance defines their  web design , mimicking the rustic charm of their establishments. Steeped in Italian warmth, their  online booking engine  and  user experience (UX)  mirror the personal touch you’d encounter at their properties. Navigate through vineyards and rolling hills to find your perfect Tuscan retreat, all within the touch of a button.

Carrier’s website is the bespoke suit of travel sites; it’s tailored to your every travel desire. Polished and intuitive, the  web design  complements the level of luxury offered in their trips. From African safaris to Caribbean cruises, the  online booking engine  makes luxury travel planning seamless. Their content not only inspires wanderlust but is built with  SEO for travel sites  in mind, ensuring a premium browsing experience.

Dharma Group

Grasp the timeless beauty of Rome through the Dharma Group’s sophisticated digital presence. The interplay of classic architecture with contemporary  web design  elements encapsulates the duality of the eternal city. Booking a stay is made thorough and straightforward with their elegant  booking system  which complements the luxurious offerings laid out in a feast of imagery and descriptions.

Costco Travel

Costco Travel brings the bargain hunting thrill into the travel planning process. Its  travel website design  is utilitarian and focused, offering deals on packages, cruises, and more. A robust  booking engine  and helpful  travel content  supports your journey from budget-friendly options to the trip itself. This is where value meets vacation, neatly packaged in a  user-friendly interface .

Seven on Shelter Island

Discover the quaint charm of a New England getaway at Seven on Shelter Island. The  travel website  is a digital reflection of their intimate B&B, offering simplicity and solace. Preparing for a serene escape is made easy, with an integrated  booking system  that’s as inviting as their coastal porch. It’s not just a website; it’s your introduction to a homely haven.

Enjoy Kamchatka

Plunge into the rugged wilderness of Russia’s Far East with Enjoy Kamchatka. Their website is a portal for the intrepid, serving up volcanic landscapes and untouched beauty in a  responsive travel design . The  booking module  is your guide to off-the-beaten-path tours, translating the diverse terrains into a navigable experience. Here’s where adventures are planned and the wilderness calls.

The Brando’s website is like stepping onto a pristine atoll of luxury. It’s exquisitely designed to reflect the elegance and serenity of Marlon Brando’s Polynesian paradise. The  user experience  is matched only by their impeccable service, with breathtaking visuals and fluid navigation guiding you to that idyllic villa. Their  booking system integration  echoes the seamless transition from the bustle of life to the hushed whispers of island tranquility.

FAQ on Travel Website Designs

Which features are must-haves for a travel website.

A homepage that grips you with wanderlust,  booking system integration  for ease, and  responsive design  across devices are just starters. Don’t skip on engaging  content management system ,  maps and location services , or  user navigation  that even my grandma would love. Throw in some  SEO-friendly design , because what’s a great site if no one can find it?

How do I make my travel website stand out?

Stand out by thinking outside the traditional layout. Infuse it with a unique  color scheme  and compelling  typography . Prioritize  user experience  with  interactive website features  and real-time social feeds for that fresh, dynamic edge. Above all,  user journey mapping  helps craft that signature, memorable trip-planning adventure.

What are the current trends in travel website design?

Right now, it’s about immersive experiences—think  virtual tour integration  and video backgrounds. People love  personalization ; it’s like having their own digital travel concierge.  Accessibility in web design  and  AMP  for speedy mobile pages are also big. Oh, and simplicity in design paired with  powerful imagery ? Always in vogue.

Can you integrate a blog within a travel website design?

Absolutely, a blog is like the cherry on top. It drives  SEO  and shares insights with gripping stories, travel tips, or destination guides. It’s the gateway for establishing that trust with your visitors, making them feel right there with you, soaking up the sun on some secluded beach.

Why is responsive design important for travel websites?

Imagine browsing for your dream vacation and it’s a hot mess on your phone. Nope!  Responsive design  ensures your site looks ace on any device. Travelers are always on-the-go, so I make sure they get the full experience whether they’re on a desktop back home or using their mobile in-transit.

How does SEO play a role in the travel website design process?

SEO is like the compass that leads travelers to your site. Keywords, sure, but it’s about  SEO entities  and  semantically relevant content . From  meta tags  to  mobile compatibility  and fast  loading speed , SEO weaves into design from the get-go. Because what’s a beautiful site if it’s hidden, right?

How important are visuals in travel website design?

Visuals are your spearhead. Top-notch photos and videos that scream ‘epic adventures ahead’ hook visitors hard. They need to feel the breeze, taste the exotic flavors through your site. It’s not just eye candy; it’s about visual storytelling that fuels the desire to explore.

What’s the best way to approach navigation design for a travel website?

Keep it intuitive. Easy-to-navigate menus, a solid  navigation structure , and a search feature are your BFFs here. It’s like giving your users a good map—without it, they’re lost, frustrated, and hopping onto another site. Streamline that journey, from looking up destinations to hitting the ‘book now’ button.

How can I ensure my travel website design is user-friendly?

Listen, empathy is the name of the game. Get inside a traveler’s mind. Simplify interactions, make info clear-cut, and the booking process a breeze. Check on  loading speeds ,  mobile compatibility , and direct CTAs. Regularly test with real users, because hey, feedback is golden.

What role does website performance play in travel website conversions?

Performance is king. If your site’s slower than a jam-packed highway in holiday season, you’re losing bookings. Fast  website loading speeds  keep potential travelers engaged. And remember, high-performance sites rank better on search engines, meaning more eyeballs on those irresistible travel deals you’re offering.

We delved deep into user experiences that practically teleport you to your next getaway and user interfaces smoother than a seasoned traveler’s itinerary. Those  responsive designs ? Key to making sure your wanderlust dreams look great on any device. And let’s not shy away from the power of  CMS  – the secret sauce that keeps your content fresh and engaging like that unexpected upgrade to first-class.

From  itinerary planner tools  to  SSL certificates , everything’s been about hooking your visitor from the get-go. Designing for travel isn’t just putting pretty pictures on a screen. Nope, it’s about crafting those  interactive maps  and  booking systems  into a seamless journey from screen to destination.

Remember, a stellar travel site is like a passport – opening up a world of possibilities with just a click. Adventure, leisure, or business, the right design bridges aspirations and reality. Now, ready to turn these examples into global digital destinations? Let’s make the web your most exciting locale yet.

If you liked this article about travel website design, you should check out these articles too: 

• The Best-Designed Parallax Scrolling Websites (108 Examples)
• Amazing App Landing Page Template Examples (42 Websites)
• The Best Simple and Efficient Minimalist Websites (104 Designs)

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25 Travel Website Design Examples for Tourism and Agencies

This page may contain links from our sponsors. Here’s how we make money .

The quality of design is very important for websites in the travel and tourism industry. These sites need to inspire and entice travelers, so travel website design is usually highly visual.

Regardless of whether the site is for a hotel, resort, travel agent, booking, or tour operator, tourism website design needs to look and function well to appeal to visitors.

On this page, we’ll take a look at travel and tourism website examples to provide web design inspiration and observe some current trends in the travel industry.

The Best Travel Website Design Examples

These travel website examples should provide plenty of inspiration that you can put to good use. Whether you’re creating a site for a hotel or resort, a comparison or booking site, or looking to design one of the best travel agency websites, you’ll find beautiful examples here.

For more web design inspiration , please see some of our other articles, like winery & vineyard websites , restaurant websites , and museum websites .

MORE Family Collection

The MORE Family Collection is a group of resorts in South Africa. The website features a clean design with a heavy does of photos and video clips. The site also uses nice typography with big, bold headline fonts .

Grand Forest

An excellent example of tourism website design, this five-star mountain hotel in Greece features a full-screen background video on the homepage that rotates clips every few seconds. Just about every page on the site includes a very large header photo.

Equinox Explore

The homepage of Equinox Explore uses several full-screen background photos with some scrolling effects. The images carry the load in this web design as the rest of the layout is fairly simple for this travel company.

Tall, True & Tangled

This website uses lots of large images, color, background patterns, and a handwritten font on the homepage. It’s one of the best tourism website design examples you’ll find.

Adams & Butler

You would expect a luxury travel agency to have a beautiful website, and Adams & Butler delivers, providing one of the best travel agency website examples. The full-screen background video on the home rotates through a number of clips that showcase amazing scenery and culture that are sure to have an impact on any website visitor or potential customer.

Aguas de Ibiza

This hotel website uses a lot of images, a nice mobile-friendly navigation menu, and a convenient way to check availability and book your stay.

Makena Golf and Beach Club

Located in Hawaii, this golf and beach club offers a highly-visual experience that is sure to make you want to book a trip. The amount of text content on the site is relatively light, allowing the images to take center stage.

Dorsia takes a different approach with its travel website. Instead of a large photo or video on the homepage, visitors are greeted with a unique illustration. The site is really well-designed with illustrations playing a significant role even on secondary pages.

This luxury Hawaiian hotel uses a full-screen video background, plus lots of big and colorful photos throughout the website.

Maryculter House

Maryculter House uses a large video background on the homepage. The rest of the site is attractive with nice typography. An elegant serif font is used for headlines.

Getaway’s website will have you ready to book a cabin rental for your next trip. The photos showcase cabins surrounded by stunning nature. In addition to viewing properties and units, you can also place your booking when you’re ready.

Visit Arizona

As one of the more spectacular states in the U.S., it makes sense that Arizona would showcase that amazing scenery in its tourism website.

Salt In Our Hair

Travel blog Salt In Our Hair features a beautiful design. The homepage uses a large background image at the top of the page. Naturally, photos play a large role throughout the site.

Explore Charleston

Charleston, SC encourages visitors with the help of an informative, attractive website. You can find the best places to stay, places to eat, shopping, and things to do while you’re there.

Relais de Chambord

This French hotel has a beautiful website to match the elegance of the building and property itself. Photos and typography are among the primary elements that make this website look great.

Spain Collection

Spain Collection offers luxury travel experiences in Spain and Portugal. The site features a lot of photos and videos, as well as some scrolling effects.

Backpacking Tours

Backpacking Tours uses a full-screen background video to grab attention and entice visitors to watch the full promo video. As you scroll down the page, you’ll see a colorful design that incorporates photos and some hand-drawn effects.

The Scott Resort & Spa

The website of The Scott Resort & Spa uses images, video, beautiful typography, and a lot of animation effects as you scroll. Overall, the site provides an excellent experience that encourages visitors to book a stay.

Discover Ireland

Discover Ireland provides information and ideas for visitors who are researching. There are many photos on the site with a heavy emphasis on the natural beauty of Ireland and outdoor activities.

Africa Travel Resource

Africa Travel Resource offers safari tours, so naturally, their website includes countless wildlife and nature photos of exotic destinations. The layout and design of the site is very clean and clutter-free.

Travelshift

Travelshift entices travelers with large, beautiful photos. On the site, you can find information about the different trips and itineraries.

Ultima Corfu

This Mediterranean wellness retreat uses a large video on the homepage. The rest of the site features plenty of photos that showcase the natural beauty.

The website for this hotel in Oslo uses a large video on the homepage. The web design incorporates nice typography and some animation effects as you scroll.

St. Regis Venice

This hotel in Venice has a quality website with plenty of information and photos. It’s easy to book a stay thanks to a sticky header menu with a “reserve now” link.

Kenauk Nature

Kenauk Nature offers luxury lodge rentals in Quebec. The homepage uses a large video to capture attention. Throughout the site you can find articles and photos about the various attractions and activities that are likely to appeal to the target audience.

Travel Website Design Trends

After browsing through this showcase, a few trends in travel website development are obvious.

Full-Screen Background Videos

Many of the sites showcased here use a large video on the homepage that immediately grabs the attention of visitors. Most of the videos rotate and change the clips every few seconds to hold viewers’ attention longer. Some sites use large background photos instead of video, but the use of video is a noticeable trend.

Heavy Use of Photos

What’s the best way to inspire travelers and encourage sharing on social media? Photos and video are much more effective than text, so it makes sense that travel and tourism websites use a lot of beautiful photos to showcase the travel destination and venues.

Not only do these sites use a lot of photos, but the photos also tend to be big and unmissable.

Clean Layouts

Most of the sites use images and videos as the primary visual elements. In some cases, the designs and layouts are fairly simple (in a good way), which allows the images to have the full attention of visitors while providing a positive user experience.

Many of the sites showcased on this page are related to luxury travel, either hotels, resorts, or travel agencies. One of the best ways to give an elegant and luxurious feel to a website is through typography. While this trend does not apply to every site on the list, several of them feature typography that adds to the feel of luxury.

Final Thoughts on Travel Website Design

We hope you enjoyed this showcase of the best travel website design examples. There are a variety of different types of businesses represented here, so you should find plenty of inspiration for your own tourism website design to create an outstanding online presence.

The travel website examples shown here use web design as a powerful tool to advertise and encourage people to visit or stay. All of these sites are valuable assets to the business and we’re sure that your site has the same potential.

Steven is an industry veteran with nearly two decades of web design experience. He was instrumental in the launch (2007) and growth of the Vandelay Design blog. Vandelay Design is one of the leading web design blogs and has reached more than 50 million visitors. Steven has also been a regular contributor at other websites like Smashing Magazine and Envato's Tuts+ and was a contributing author for the Smashing Book. Connect with Steven at LinkedIn .

How to Create Information Architecture for Web Design

• 17 min read
• 5 Apr, 2023
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Imagine this situation: You visit a website and spend time looking for the information you need. You click one link, then another, and again, and again… But you come up empty – you can’t find anything useful. Whether you’re a product owner or designer, you don’t want your website to be a maze with nothing but frustrating blind alleys. Information architecture helps to avoid this. It handles the chaos, creating a clear structure for a website, an app, or a program. In this article, we’ll explain how you can build superb information architecture.

What is information architecture?

When you arrive at a new place, you need something to guide you. If you’re spending a weekend in an unfamiliar city, you have to consult a map. Then you use street signs and addresses on buildings to reach your destination. It’s the same with any unfamiliar location: You don’t want to waste time and get lost, so you need guidance. Information architecture (IA) is the science of structuring content as it is applied to news websites or blogs, online stores, booking apps, downloadable software, etc. The goal of information architecture is to classify the content in a clear and understandable way and arrange it according to relations between the content pieces, allowing users to find what they need with less effort. Not applied solely when creating a product from scratch, IA is used in redesign. Information architecture is a part of interaction design that considers content, context, and users. This means that user needs, business goals, and different types of content must be taken into account while structuring a product’s information.

Main components of information architecture. Source: Lucia Wang

Usually, information architecture design falls under the care of UX and UI designers or an information architect. To avoid confusion, let’s briefly go over the differences between these similar terms.

Information architecture vs UX vs UI

How IA, UX, and UI are related, image credit. Source: Scorch

Information architect role

The key steps of information architecture development

Conduct customer research

The aim of this stage is to learn about a user’s needs. You must work with a customer profile and the results of customer and stakeholder interviews. The data revealed at this stage will allow you to create a user persona profile, list business requirements, and get an idea of what a user wants. Since these tasks belong to a UX designer or business analyst, you need the results of their activities. At the end of this stage, you’ll end up with a user profile and user flow that illustrate the way a user thinks and interacts with a product. When you have all the necessary information about the product and the people who use/will use it, you can go to the next step.

Review and update the content

Once you know what a user wants, you can update the content of an existing website and list it. The main activities to perform at this stage are content inventory and content audit . Let’s look closer at each of them.

Content inventory

The goal of this activity is to create a list of information elements on all the pages of a website and classify them by topic and sub-topic. This includes the following items:

• Headings and subheadings
• Media files (images, video, audio)
• Documents (doc, pdf, ppt)
• URL-links of the pages

Content inventory template. Source: Eckford

Content audit

Well, you have the content list. Now, assess its accuracy, style of presentation, and usefulness. Then, scrap the least important items, refresh outdated pieces of content, and rearrange them for the next steps. This activity is applicable both to new products and to app or website redesigns . The next step involves grouping content into different categories. Here, you’ll need the help of potential users.

Apply card sorting for content classification

All types of content must be classified and have proper names that won’t confuse a user. You need a taxonomy to do it. Taxonomy is another word for classification. In the case of IA, it’s an attempt to group different unstructured pieces of information and give them descriptions.

How card sorting works.Source: Interaction design

There are three types of card sorting: Open – for free labeling. The participants categorize topics however they like and in the order that makes sense to them. This approach allows you to understand how the users think in terms of classification. Open type is used to design new products. Closed – with pre-designed categories. This method of card sorting is usually applied in redesign. The participants are given predefined categories from a content inventory list, and they sort the content according to them. Hybrid – unites elements of both types, or starts with an open type, moving to the closed type to follow user logic. You can conduct card sorting in groups, as a personal interview, or remotely via IA tools like UserZoom or Optimal Sort . The cards can be digital or physical, i.e. written on pieces of paper. When creating cards, use the results of content inventory. Separate topics have to be on separate index cards. They should have numbers and some should have blank spaces, so the participants can create their own names for categories. As a result, you’ll see the approximate structure of a product and proceed with the first prototypes. But first, the categories must be labeled and defined in a navigation system.

Build a website hierarchy for user-friendly navigation

Every website or app needs a solid navigation system that helps users find what they need. As soon as you have the results of card sorting activities, you will understand how to embody and classify the content in reality. This step embraces navigation design, labeling, and site mapping. Let’s define them one by one.

A drop-down menu on Walmart website homepage. Source: Walmart

Left-sided menu on Wikipedia. Source: Wikipedia

Local navigation on the Udemy website. Source: Udemy

Multiple navigation components on SBA website. Source: NN Group

Word search in a dictionary. Source: Merriam-Webster

Google Travel website labeling with names and icons. Source: Google Travel

Once you outline navigation and labeling, it’s time to decide on the hierarchy design pattern.

Hierarchy design patterns

Flat structure

Index pages pattern

Strict hierarchy pattern – similar to index pages pattern, but more branchy: Each subpage has one or more subpages. Strict hierarchy pattern is chosen by websites that have a large number of categories such as blogs, eCommerce sites, or media.

Co-existing hierarchy pattern

As soon as you have decided on a design pattern, you can apply it along with the results of card sorting in site mapping. However, site map creation is often preceded by a mind map.

Mind mapping

Mind map for Cornerstone information systems website and iOS app

Now, having a mind map, you can create a site map.

Information architecture diagram creation and site mapping

A portfolio website sitemap. Source: Kellyn Loehr on Dribble

On a sitemap, you visualize the whole hierarchy of content. You can make it on paper or using different tools like WriteMaps or MindNode . Sitemaps for IA design are typically created in the form of diagrams and are referred to as information architecture diagrams . They can also be presented in XML or HTML formats to help search engines understand your website structure and find relevant information. XML is barely readable by users (check this example of Victorious XML sitemap ), but HTML sitemaps look like usual webpages and can be read by humans and search engine robots alike. Here’s an example of an HTML sitemap of an Apple website . Show the sitemap to stakeholders and send it to developers so that they can understand what to do next: Are there any important changes that have to be applied before a product goes into production? Still, there is one more stage before production – prototyping.

Create a UI prototype for future development

Although a sitemap is the first prototype in information architecture development, you still have to create advanced prototypes by wireframing and data modeling.

Wireframing

Wireframe of Back to my body web app. Source: Dribble

Wireframes are drawn on paper or using special software like Justinmind or Visio for creating digital wireframes, sitemaps, or high-fidelity prototypes. Wireframes are tested by users to define whether the structure is clear and concise.

Data modeling

The final step before development is data modeling: You can embody the content structure in data modeling systems. At this stage, you communicate the prototypes to stakeholders and developers to work on a product. Usually, it’s done via wireframes or right through CMS (content management systems), which are the supporting systems for content publishing, like Squarespace , WordPress , and Wix . Lay the content out via CMS and later use it as the platform for website development.

Test and improve

Testing activities can be conducted at different stages of the design process to guide designers and polish IA. They are often a part of the research phase, especially if you’re looking for ways to redesign an existing app or website. However, it’s imperative to test your information architecture as soon as the prototype is ready and before it gets to the development team. This practice can help you avoid costly mistakes like having to rebuild your product. Here, such methods as usability testing and first click testing are applied. You can test both initial prototypes (often a paper draft) and clickable prototypes to detect possible navigation or layout problems.

Usability testing

Usability testing allows you to make sure the designed structure works for your users. During usability testing, participants are required to interact with your product in a typical way, like they would’ve done in real life. For example, you can ask them to look for specific information (e.g., contact or payment details, certain item for sale, etc.) or perform a specific task (e.g., register a new account, complete a purchase, etc.). Obviously, they can’t find the answers as the content is not ready yet, but they can still indicate their course of action while interacting with your future product. By observing their actions and collecting user feedback , you can find out which parts work right, which don’t, and what has to be fixed. The main goal here is to check if users can easily get what they need from your app or website.

First click testing

First click testing is also helpful to measure usability by defining if the first click the visitor makes on the app or website interface is easy and intuitive. It shows how users get around your site and how easy it is for them to do what they want. During such testing, you prepare a few typical scenarios (just like with usability testing) and define the optimal ways of going through them. Then, give tasks to your users and track where they click and how long it takes them to find a correct solution. Sometimes the first click can be right, but it takes too long to find the needed button or link. At other times, the first click is wrong and it takes extra steps to get to the right page (if they get there at all.) First click testing can detect navigation and layout problems at the prototyping stage or on a functioning website/app. As you conduct the testing, remember to collect qualitative data in addition to quantitative information on clicks. Users’ explanations on why they did what they did will help you understand your customers better and improve your product.

The eight principles of Information Architecture

The eight principles of information architecture. Source: CareerFoundry

These eight principles were defined by Dan Brown , a co-founder of EightShapes design company. An information architect should stick to them to build a product:

• objects — a content is a living thing with its lifecycle, behaviors, and attributes;
• choices — the pages of a product should offer a number of meaningful choices to users;
• disclosure — the users mustn’t be overloaded with information; show only enough information to help them understand what kinds of information they’ll find as they dig deeper;
• exemplars — the best way to describe the content categories is to show examples of the contents;
• front doors — assume at least half of the website’s visitors will come through some page other than the home page;
• multiple classification — offer users several different classification schemes to browse the site’s content;
• focused navigation — don’t mix different categories in your navigation scheme; and
• growth — assume the content you have today is a small fraction of the content you will have tomorrow.

Applying these principles, you are likely to effectively structure existing content and leave a space for growth.

Information architecture examples

As you have already seen, almost every stage has its own deliverables. But the most important deliverable that unites the results of an information architect’s hard work is a sitemap. Now, let’s look at some actual website sitemaps to see how they structure their content.

Spotify sitemap

Renee Lin, a UX designer, found a way to improve it by simplifying it and removing some sections. This is an example of how an existing website can be redesigned to make it easier for users to get around and interact with it.

IMDB website’s navigation flow. Source: Medium

Suggested information hierarchy for IMDB website. Source: Medium

Among other important segments are Discussions, Trailers, Wishlists, and User Reviews . Less crucial appeared to be My Account , Login/Sign up, and OTT Links ( links to the over-the-top media services distributing video content via the Internet.) These positions are placed as the lowest ones in the hierarchy scheme.

Typical sitemap for travel website

Sample travel website sitemap. Source: Visual Paradigm

Tools for IA

We’ve already mentioned some of the popular tools that are used for creating IA. Here, we’ll briefly list what can be of help at different stages. Online card sorting tools include

• xSort , and
• Optimal Sort .

To create sitemaps online , you can use such platforms as

• WriteMaps ,
• MindManager ,
• Slick Plan , or

Prototypes and wireframes can be created with the help of

• Justinmind ,
• Wireframe.cc ,
• Balsamiq , or
• Microsoft Visio .

Diagrams and flowcharts are designed and shared through such platforms as

• Lucidchart ,
• OmniGraffle (MacOS only), or
• diagrams.net (formerly draw.io).

Testing and research can be conducted using

• Proven by Users ,
• UserTesting ,
• User Zoom , or

Content management systems (CMSs) that can come in handy include

• Squarespace ,
• WordPress ,
• Drupal , and

Latest information architecture trends

The heyday of AI, machine learning, and VR technologies will undoubtedly have an impact on the way users navigate through the content on websites, and applications. Two key trends are likely to drive the future of information architecture. Zero UI. If you have ever used Google Assistant or Alexa, you know what it’s like: A user finds necessary information without even touching a screen, just by saying a couple of words or by a mere gesture. Zero UI, a new design concept, removes the need to touch the screen to control virtual reality and smart devices. Eventually, zero UI technology will allow people to communicate with various devices using not only movements or voice, but also glances and even thoughts. AI optimized information architecture. Artificial intelligence and machine learning can improve the accuracy and efficiency of information architecture , making it easier for users to find what they need. This may involve using algorithms to automatically organize and categorize content and predict user behavior.

Why IA matters for your business

Well-structured information architecture is crucial for businesses as it significantly impacts the usability, accessibility, and overall user experience of a website or application. Improved user engagement is one of the primary benefits worth mentioning here. By providing users with a clear and logical structure of the product, businesses help them find the necessary information faster and more efficiently. This may lead to higher conversion rates, increased user retention rates, and, ultimately, provide businesses with a greater return on investment (ROI). What is more, a well-designed IA can enhance the search engine optimization efforts of a website. With the help of appropriate labeling information architecture improves the website’s ranking on search engine result pages. This ensures the increased website traffic and visibility, benefiting the business as a result

17 February 2017

9 Best Examples of Travel Website Design

Travel websites provide a whole package of travel experience which used to rest on the shoulders of offline travel agents. Today, the online travel market size has reached $432 billion, as most people want to book their trips through websites themselves. That’s why tourism website design is of crucial importance in marketing. 

This article explores trends in travel web development and design, killer features, cost, tech stack, and Agente’s experience as a tourism web design company. 

Trends in travel website design and development

Utility is the word to live by when it comes to travel and tourism web development and design. Take a look at the latest trends that represent this concept:

• Simplicity: Websites are now developed and designed to make them efficient on mobile devices, leaving behind clumsy and cluttered layouts. Modular design, flat architecture, and simple navigation are the design choices these days.
• Inspirational videos: Great quality videos, like interactive city guides and 360-degree clips inspire people and boost their motivation to travel.
• User-generated content: More and more website source content from clients’ social media, creating boards with Instagram or Facebook photos. It helps to demonstrate real-life experiences and builds trust between the website and its users.
• Data analytics. Travel website developers introduce travel boards to gain invaluable insights into the forms of content users prefer, the partners that provide the best services, and a lot more.

Features to add to tourism website design

The tourism and travel industry includes many types of sites, like bookings, tour operators, accessory suppliers, and blogs. Therefore, the functionality will vary depending on your specialization. Here, we describe the features common to all travel and tourism websites.

Registration

Registration should include manual filling out and connecting to Google, Apple, and Facebook accounts, as well as email address and signing in through the accounts.

Source:  Airbnb

Search bars and filtering

It’s essential to allow people to find places by commonly searched features such as location, available rooms; free Wi-Fi, parking, room service, breakfast, or wheelchair accessibility.

Source:  Expedia

Customer reviews

People want to get as much information about the place they are going to visit or the product/ service they want to purchase, so reviews and testimonials from travelers always enhance credibility.

Source:  Booking.com

Reservations

You need to create a reservation system that manages dates, room types, facilities, tour packages, and more. Don’t forget to create blocked-out slots for unavailable options.

It’s great for users to see the upcoming months' options so they can compare prices and get the best value for money.

High-quality images and meaningful descriptions

Visual content inspires people and conveys a more precise message about the place, product, or service. High-quality images  boost the brand’s credibility together with an evocative, compelling, and keyword-rich copy.

Source:  Vrbo

Payment gateways

You can use popular gateways like Stripe, PayPal, Braintree or Dwolla. Include multi-currency acceptance; it makes your site much more user-friendly.

Source:  Kiwi

Notifications

It’s good practice to notify registered users about booking confirmations, cancelations, or purchased equipment via email. If users allow, keep them updated on places worth visiting with push notifications.

Customer support

Customer help should be available from any page. It’s for you to decide whether it will be in the dropdown menu or chat support.

Enable website visitors to find  places by selecting the exact location or distance range on a map. The map should be interactive with activities available, prices, and several photos of the destination.

Source:  TripAdvisor

Examples of Travel and Tourism Website Design

We’ve divided all the examples into three categories:

• search and booking (OTAs, flights, and hotels)
• custom packaging tours and holidays
• travel content sites and portals

We will analyze websites in each category and then describe why we have chosen these sites, considering criteria such as user experience, visual UI design and its quality, as well as content and services presented on the website.

Search and booking

There are many systems and services for searching and booking flights and hotels. The most popular are used each time people are planning their next trip, while others are used less often because they are niche booking engines or services. We chose the most interesting websites relating to the criteria described above.

Source:  Kayak

An industry leader can’t have bad usability. It looks like hundreds of user tests are performed each week, and thousands of user metrics are tracked and gathered by the system for the following analytics. As a result, you get a system with great UX design, well-thought out structure, and even an adaptive logotype.

Kayak has a clear UI design style with flat elements complemented by big hero images, used as a background of the main search area. These images are related, and change according to search requests. The visual style is simple and clean, with bright color accents on call-to-action elements, which effectively attracts users’ attention.

The range of services on such types of sites has already become an industry standard with minimum variations and deviations. The content is well-structured, the main popular sections are highlighted and additionally marketed with glyph icons, which catches users’ eyes and immediately tells them what’s behind the content blocks.  

Source:  Skyscanner

This website provides a clean and smooth UX when it comes to searching for flights, hotels, and cars. The search results are well-structured; each is separated from the other, which helps users perceive the page’s content much easier. The main booking buttons are well-highlighted and located in the main user's focus area.

The color scheme of visual UI is based on three main colors with minimalistic flat backgrounds. The beautiful background picture doesn’t distract from the content.

Skyscanner is not  just a flight search, it offers hotel and car bookings as well, which provides an all-in one travelling experience.

Design Hotels

Source:  Design Hotels

Design Hotels is a well-known brand in the travel market as a niche searching and booking service, so a service with “design” in the title can't have bad UX/UI design because the target audience is rather spoiled, and is used to beautiful design and ease-of-use aspects. Yes, this project has good UX design, the responsive layout is well thought out, and calls to action are visible and well-placed.

The visual structure of the pages is not cluttered; it is well balanced with an emphasis on huge photos. The rest of the UI exists like the frame for the picture, which helps to draw attention to the beautiful design hotels.

The website offers the full range of services related to Design Hotels all over the world. Content is well-structured and grouped by the categories.

Custom packaging tours and holidays

We single out this category because there are so many impressive projects on the market that offer customized tours and niche travel possibilities. Tourists can take cruise adventures or journeys by car for business trips, or relaxing holidays to exotic destinations within any price range.

Travel Triangle

Source:  Travel Triangle

Travel Triangle is one of the leaders in its category and niche, so leadership really deserves by thoughtful UX design and attractive visual UI.  

The color scheme uses pastels with flat UI elements, beautiful typography and use of custom iconography. The color accents on buttons are well balanced and noticeable. There’s a lot of space in which to easily find each functional element.

This project is loaded with interesting content and offers; there’s a choice of your perfect destination by theme; all content is well-structured.

Arctic Wild

Source:  Arctic Wild

The information structure is well-thought out; calls to action are visible and nicely placed. The multi-level navigation is useful and well-structured.

The color scheme is well-balanced, the accents on the pages are adventure photos. The design style is a bit outdated, but it still works well on the audience.

The website offers the full range of services related to Arctic travel activities. Content is well-structured and grouped by the categories.

The Yacht Week

Source:  The Yacht Week

The Yacht Week is the industry leader and a famous brand in the yachting travel niche. The overall impression of using the website wasn't bad. The header navigation looks too small, but the structure is well-organized, and it’s easy to get the needed information in a few clicks.

Visual UI design is based mostly on large, attractive photos, and the color scheme consists of two main colors: blue and white. It would be nice to add a third accent color for important CTA elements, like buttons or some important UI controls.

The content and services look good; the site provides a lot of yachting-related types of entertainment in a range of destinations, and the blog section consists of typical promo content materials.

Travel content sites and portals

Some of the travel content sites use mixed models with booking and search services, but most of them provide the traveler with full information about countries, sharing inspirational ideas about traveling and possible ways to spend holidays.

Conde Nast Traveler

Source:  Conde Nast Traveler

It’s no surprise that the largest media-publishing company owns one of the best content media resources related to traveling.

Conde Nast has been serving users/readers from a variety of niches for more than one century already, so they have a lot of UX design practice. I can say that UX in modern online media is sufficiently standardized, so Conde Nast Traveler is keeping good UX design standards.

This site has a content-centered design style, based on huge photography and typography with a lot of white space, which helps to perceive the content much easier.

The content is the king here. Everything is made around content and based on the content.

Source:  Skift

The subsection of the website related to traveling has a good UX; the navigation is clear and well-structured, and the rest of the UX features are industry standard. 

The newspaper/magazine style layout has a lot of whitespace, huge typography and headers, and an emphasis on large photos.

Not only is Skift always at the cutting edge of tourism news, but the resource produces some of the most thoroughly researched and future-focused reports in the industry.

Jetsetter Magazine

Source:  Jetsetter

The magazine section of the famous Jetsetter portal uses a typical grid structure layout, the usability is quite good enough, and the simple magazine functionality does not imply any super-custom or complex UX design features. Long-read articles have a good design with sub navigation, so it’s much easier to read the content.

Jetsetter has a blog- or magazine-style grid layout, with photos and a lot of white space.

The quality of photo content is the core of Jetsetter; all articles are supplemented with amazing professional photos and the post structure is well-divided with headings and subheadings.

How much does travel website design and development cost?

The final cost of tourism web design services and end-to-end development depends on the project scope, budget, number of specialists involved, and the specialists’ location. The basic feature set will usually engage a team of 7–10 members skilled at the development of travel websites:

• project manager
• data Scientist
• 2–3 frontend developers
• 2–3 backend developers
• 1–2 QAs

When it comes to costs, an MVP will take around a month and will cost $31,000 in Eastern European countries. A fully-fledged product is normally ready within six months and will cost around $150 000 in Eastern Europe.

Tech Stack for Travel Website Development

The exact technologies may vary depending on the feature set required for a project, possible features are scalability, performance, cost, support, and maintenance. Here, we give the basics.

Frontend programming usually involves JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Ember.js, jQuery, Backbone.js, and JavaScript technologies such as Angular, React, and Vue.

The backend programming languages include Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Node. js, .NET.

Our company has extensive experience in developing travel projects mostly for the CIS market, mostly OTA (online travel agency website design) and booking platforms that provide flights, hotels, and car bookings. Take a look at our portfolio:

Source:  One Life

Triptracker

Source:   Agente

Source:  Agente

Final Words

We hope our analysis will be useful for travel industry representatives. If you’re still wondering how to combine functionality and design, at least you know that nothing is impossible.

Moreover, applying our insights to a business travel app can significantly enhance its usability and appeal to professional travelers.

Use your bravest ideas and give them to professionals. AGENTE is always here to help you create an OTA or any other travel product or service from scratch—or improve your existing one. Our wide experience lets us deliver high-quality results mixed with the most creative and innovative solutions. Reach out to discuss your next project.

Are there any new features for travel websites in the post-pandemic world?

When it comes to booking flights and property, it’s becoming more and more popular to add the feature called “insurance.” A person can purchase insurance against catching COVID-19 and having to cancel the trip.

How to create an online travel website

There are several ways to do that. The cheapest is to create a website on a website builder, however, it will be too simple and won’t fit all the features you want. The second option is to buy an out-of-the-box solution and customize it. The feature set will not be impressive, and there may be problems with scalability. The third option is to hire travel website developers who will leverage their experience to create a fully-fledged custom solution.

How long does it take to develop a tourism website?

If we are talking about an MVP, it will take about a month (with standard features). A fully-fledged solution development will take around six months.

Read also: How to develop a website like Udemy ?

Partner / Managing Director

Andrew Terehin

Andrew is the Founder of Agente. The decade of experience in the UX design field, web development, and business development help him to find efficient solutions for clients and share this knowledge with the audience.

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What is Website Architecture? 8 Easy Ways to Improve Your Site Structuring

Published: April 03, 2024

Getting lost sucks. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a city or a corn maze, the ambiguity of not knowing where you are and what could happen next can make you break out in a cold sweat.

It’s critical to structure your site in an intuitive and easy-to-navigate way to retain your audience’s attention. If you don’t, they’ll bounce in seconds. And if people leave your website because your user experience is messy, search engines won’t think highly of you, either.

If you need help structuring a website that will engage an audience and rank on Google, we’ve got you covered. We’ll teach you what website architecture is, why it’s important for UX and SEO, and how you can develop a sound architecture for your own website.

What is website architecture?

Website architecture is the hierarchical structure of your website pages. This structure is reflected through internal linking. Your website’s structure should help users easily find information and help search engine crawlers understand the relationship between different pages.

Without question, your website structure plays a critical role in retaining users and boosting conversions.

Implementing a website structure helps you design your website for the user experience . You might have the most amazing content, but if users can’t find it, they’ll leave for a competitor’s site.

A typical website structure looks like a rooted tree graph , in which the home page is the root. The pages that are linked out from the home page are branches, and from there, each page has additional branches sprouting from it. These branches then link to each other.

Here’s what that typically looks like:

Why is website structuring important?

A sound website architecture strengthens your website’s user experience. When you structure your website in an intuitive way, users can seamlessly find the information they’re looking for.

Plus, when your user experience is strong, your search engine rankings will be, too. Users will spend more time on your website and link to your web pages, which are both heavy indicators that your brand creates quality content.

Furthermore, a solid website architecture:

• Helps search engines effectively crawl your website.
• Encourages deep site navigation by providing more pages for users to visit.
• Distributes “page authority” more equitably, so that a page isn’t left out.
• Strengthens topical authority because of the strong internal linking structure between related or similar topics.
• Increases conversions by making it easier to find products and lead-generating content .

Let’s take a look at a few best practices you should keep in mind when designing your site’s architecture.

Website Architecture Best Practices

• Create a simple top-level navigation menu.
• Keep your URLs simple and user-friendly.
• Model your website architecture after the top players in your industry.
• Keep your website consistent.
• Implement the pillar-cluster internal linking model.
• Provide access to most of your website’s pages in 3-4 clicks.
• Use breadcrumbs.
• Create an HTML and XML sitemap.

1. Create a simple top-level navigation menu.

First, don’t provide too many top-level menu items. Second, be sure to deliver the content that’s promised based on the menu item’s name.

For instance, if your users click on the "Email Marketing" tab on your blog’s homepage, they expect to be directed to a list of email marketing posts. From this page, you also need to design a simple navigation path back to your blog’s homepage and your website’s homepage.

Check out an example below from our own website :

The menu is divided into three simple menu items: Software, Pricing, and Resources. Under the “Resources” tab, users can find different resources that are divided into different designations.

Don’t make your users think too hard. A hard-to-navigate website will have a high bounce rate. Users don't want to waste time trying to find information on your site. If they do, they’ll just leave. So practice empathy and provide an intuitive web experience.

2. Keep your URLs simple and user-friendly.

No user wants to read a URL structured like this:

example.com/store/rackets/default.aspx?lang=en&category=98a20

It’s important to create user-friendly URLs. Most CMS systems, such as Content Hub and WordPress , automatically create a user-friendly URL based on your page’s title. It will usually read as follows:

example.com/page-title

You can also create subdirectories that are easy to follow.

example.com/topic/subtopic/page-title

Tip : While subdirectories are helpful from a UX standpoint, they aren’t required to reflect your site’s architecture. Internal linking matters more than URL structure. That means that you can structure your URLs as follows:

example.com/topic

example.com/subtopic

example.com/longtail-keyword-one

example.com/longtail-keyword-two

You simply have to connect them to each other and to their parent pages with internal links.

3. Model your website architecture after the top players in your industry.

Your customers are used to the website architecture of major brands in your industry, so if you run an ecommerce store, analyze how Amazon structures their website and emulate them. Your website will seem more familiar and, in turn, easier to navigate.

4. Keep your website consistent.

Your website’s navigation format, design principles, and link displays should all follow a consistent pattern. Keeping these elements the same will keep your users on your site longer because it'll be easier for them to quickly navigate to new pages and click on links.

5. Implement the pillar-cluster internal linking model.

In the pillar-cluster model , you have a parent page (the pillar) linking out to child pages (the cluster). These child pages then link to each other, creating a cluster.

This model makes your internal linking structure clearer and effectively directs users to other pieces of relevant and useful content. When users come across an internal link on your website, they should immediately understand which piece of content the link will direct them to and why that content is linked from the page they’re currently on.

Here’s what a pillar-cluster linking strategy looks like for a blog about workout routines.

The lines represent internal links.

One internal linking caution you should exercise, though, is not stuffing keywords into your link’s anchor text . This is called black hat SEO , and to prevent it, Google has created specific algorithms to punish this kind of behavior.

6. Provide access to most of your website’s pages in 3-4 clicks.

Even if your website has a million pages, the architecture should allow users to start from the homepage and end up on any page within three to four clicks.

To do this, design a top-level navigation that can direct users to your website’s main categories. Then, from each of your website’s main category pages, make sure they can click-through to all the sub-category pages.

7. Use breadcrumbs.

After internal linking, breadcrumbs are the ultimate way to show your website’s architecture. These links show a page’s parent pages all the way to the home page. They’re typically placed above the page’s title and have arrows showing the path to the current page.

Here's an example from Best Buy :

You can add breadcrumbs to your Content Hub website by creating an advanced menu module . If you run your website on the WordPress CMS, we’ve written an easy tutorial on how you can add breadcrumbs to WordPress .

8. Create an HTML and XML sitemap.

A sitemap is a document that lists out all of the crawlable pages on your website. It’s exceedingly important for website architecture because it shows your structure in a readable, crawlable format.

An HTML sitemap is user-facing and has the same design as the rest of your website. It’s typically designed for users who can’t find a certain page and who’d benefit from seeing a list of all of your pages.

Here’s eBay’s HTML sitemap as an example:

An XML sitemap is designed primarily for search engine crawlers. They list all of the URLs in a plain-text format. If your site is on WordPress, you can use a sitemap plugin to create both an HTML and XML sitemap.

Upgrade Your Website Architecture and Improve Your SEO

Your website’s architecture is incredibly important for both user experience and SEO. With a solid website structuring strategy, you’ll improve dwell time and entice users to consume more of your content. That means more conversions down the line, improving your ROI and increasing revenue at your company.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in October 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Don't forget to share this post!

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10 Best Travel Website Design Examples That Will Make You Want to Pack Your Bags

published 13, October 2020

updated 24, July 2023

For several years, tourism has been a significant contributor to the global economy, and many countries rely on this sector for their GDP growth. However, the COVID-19 pandemic presented an unparalleled challenge to the industry in 2020. With most countries imposing travel restrictions or in lockdown, tourism faced immense pressure to stay afloat.

With the internet being the primary source of information for many people, travel websites have become crucial in providing comprehensive details about tourism services and attractions. It’s no wonder that tourism companies invest heavily in their online platforms, ensuring they are as user-friendly as possible.

As a web design agency that has worked with various travel agencies, we understand the importance of creating exceptional travel websites in 2023. We’ve compiled a list of some of the best travel website designs to get you inspired.

Captivating Travelers: Must-Have Features for an Outstanding Tourism Website

Before we start exploring the best travel websites, let’s define what makes a great tourism platform and what features you should consider when designing one in 2023.

• Visually Appealing Design: A clean, modern, and visually appealing design is crucial for capturing visitors’ attention. High-quality images and videos showcasing the destination’s highlights, culture, and natural beauty are essential for evoking a sense of wanderlust.
• Easy Navigation: A user-friendly interface with clear navigation menus and a logical site structure ensures that visitors can quickly find the information they’re looking for. Including a search function, filters, and categorization of content can further enhance the browsing experience.
• Mobile Responsiveness: A responsive design ensures that the website is accessible and functional on various devices, including smartphones and tablets. This is important as a significant portion of users access websites on mobile devices, especially while traveling.
• Informative Content: Provide detailed, up-to-date, and accurate information about the destination’s attractions, accommodations, restaurants, and activities. Content should be written in a captivating and engaging manner, enticing visitors to explore and plan their trip.
• Multilingual Support: Offering content in multiple languages increases the website’s accessibility to a broader audience, ensuring that travelers from different linguistic backgrounds can comfortably navigate and understand the information provided.
• Interactive Maps: Incorporate interactive maps that allow users to explore the destination, find nearby attractions, and get directions. This helps visitors plan their routes and visualize the proximity of various points of interest.
• Personalization: Personalized recommendations based on users’ preferences and interests can enhance the user experience and make the website more relevant to individual visitors.
• Social Media Integration: Incorporate social media sharing buttons and feeds, allowing users to share their favorite attractions, accommodations, and experiences with their networks. This not only amplifies the destination’s reach but also adds a layer of social proof.
• Reviews and Testimonials: Including reviews and testimonials from previous visitors adds credibility to the website and helps potential travelers make informed decisions about their trip.
• Online Booking and Reservation System: A seamless and secure online booking system for accommodations, tours, and activities simplifies the planning process for travelers and increases the likelihood of them making reservations directly through the website.
• Contact Information and Support: Provide clear contact information and support options, such as email, phone, or live chat, to assist visitors with any questions or concerns they may have while planning their trip.

By integrating these features, a tourism website can effectively engage visitors, provide valuable information, and ultimately inspire them to book their next adventure.

Best Travel Website Design Examples

Here are some examples of travel websites that excel in design and functionality. These websites showcase various aspects of an effective tourism website, such as visually appealing designs, easy navigation, informative content, and more.

Experience an Immersive Adventure with Visit Humboldt’s Game-Inspired Travel Website Design

Travel websites often feature beautiful images of faraway destinations but provide minimal information about the services and tours available. However, Visit Humboldt, a travel agency website, is a refreshing change from this norm.

Humboldt County, California, is renowned for its redwood forests and well-developed hiking trails, and Visit Humboldt’s web design provides an immersive adventure for visitors. The one-page, game-inspired interface allows users to choose between activities, places to stay, and interesting spots to visit. Users can add their preferred options to a virtual suitcase, which will be planned and scheduled to create a personalized travel itinerary.

Visit Humboldt’s website design features clickable elements and interlinked pages, ensuring visitors stay longer on the site, improving the company’s SEO parameters, and creating a memorable brand voice . The interactive user experience of the site makes it difficult to leave, as users can watch beautiful scenery, learn about the various regions of Humboldt County, and experience the whimsical and magical character of the California countryside.

If you’re looking for an innovative and engaging travel website design, Visit Humboldt is the perfect choice.

Tour Partner Group Website Development and Design: User-Friendly and Functional with a Corporate Look

Tour Partner Group is a collective of destination management companies from various European travel agencies that specialize in providing tailor-made tours in the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Nordics, and the Baltic states. The Tour Partner Group website is incredibly user-friendly, with a variety of photos, readable text, and easy navigation. Visitors can browse the company’s main destinations, brochures, and learn more about their history and services.

Ester Digital developed and designed the Tour Partner Group website , ensuring it was bold, colorful, and functional, with a clear corporate look and sleek visual architecture. The designers made sure to balance the bright corporate colors with a welcoming and inviting design that supports the website’s usability. Micro-interactions, animations, and icons were added to enhance the user experience, and the mobile version of the platform was optimized for all devices.

Context Travel: A Travel Agency Website with a Smooth and Transparent Design

Context Travel is a travel company that provides tours with specific themes and objectives, such as art, Jewish heritage, cuisine, and more. All tour guides are highly trained and specialize in their respective areas, providing expert knowledge about topics and locations that visitors are interested in.

The Context Travel website design is smooth and transparent, focusing on clearly arranged information blocks rather than flashy photos or colorful images . The website’s tone does not overtly advertise its expertise, but the platform’s design appeals directly to its audience’s needs. Context Travel is a prime example of a travel company that has tailored its position in the market to provide customers with a special and memorable experience.

Outlines: How Color Palette Can Boost Your Travel Website Design

Outlines is a travel agency that caters to non-tourists by promoting a low ecological footprint, supporting local communities in the places they visit, and expanding travelers’ horizons emotionally, as well as physically and geographically. The Outlines website design reflects this unconventional approach, with Mars-like landscape photos and neatly arranged information blocks that focus on the company’s message.

The website’s orange color is used consistently throughout, even in small details such as transport icons, to ensure cohesiveness and brand recognition. The company’s routes are listed according to difficulty mode, with each trip described thoroughly, including the number of participants and main destination points. Their creative approach to traveling is reflected in the use of contrasting colors and additional icons that serve illustrative purposes.

Rome2Rio: The Travel Agency Website with Ultimate Functionality

Rome2Rio is a travel agency website that offers innovative and practical tools for finding transportation around the world. Although the website’s design is not the most distinctive or eye-catching, its functionality more than makes up for it. Rome2Rio’s tools facilitate the process of finding transportation, providing several alternatives and transportation types at a time.

This travel agency site is particularly useful for those planning a long-distance journey or on a budget and need to see all possible financial options. Rome2Rio carefully plans the trip and shows the cheapest ways to travel along the entire route. In addition to transportation schedules, the website can track bookings for hotels, airports, and car rides. Visitors can create an account and manage all their booking details themselves.

Arctic Wild’s User-Friendly Tourism Website: Your Guide to Alaska

Arctic Wild is a tourism website dedicated to the areas near Fairbanks, Alaska, offering classic hiking, rafting, camping, and photography trips. Visitors can view all scheduled trips, make reservations, and request custom-made trips tailored to their specific needs. The website’s navigation is clear, and all calls to action and clickable elements are easy to find and use.

The homepage features breathtaking photos of nature and an incredible presentation video. The harmonious and serene color scheme of the site evokes a sense of tranquility and peacefulness that is associated with Alaska. The website provides an enjoyable user experience , with information that is well-balanced and informative. Visitors can check out the places they plan to visit and see the profiles of guides who will navigate them through the wilderness, contributing to the platform’s personable feel.

The Yacht Week: Engaging Website Design

The Yacht Week is a travel company website that provides an exclusive one-week yachting experience. Visitors can choose between their customized traveling plan or a scheduled-out package. They can also choose their crew, hire skippers and hosts, or find new members to add via a special search tool if their team is less than 12 members.

The website’s white and blue color palette and large negative space areas fully explore the sea theme. The site features numerous inviting photos of people enjoying the sun and having fun on yachts. Visitors can feel the light sea breeze and can’t help but be tempted to try out The Yacht Week’s services.

As an industry leader in the given niche sphere, The Yacht Week’s navigation tools are impeccable, and the information provided on the website is full and detailed. The platform also features a nicely structured blog with insights and promotional materials.

Experience England: Elegant and Premium Design

Experience England is a travel agency that provides luxurious and unique events and tours across Wales and England, including London. The website’s elegant and premium design is designed to appeal to even the most demanding clients. The platform is concise, with no overwhelming CTAs, photos, or data blocks. Experience England knows its target audience and appeals directly to them.

The Ester Digital team worked on the travel agency logo and branding, and the logo appears across all website pages. The color palette of royal blue and gold exudes poise and excellence. The site features photos of the locations where they hold meetings and destinations of some of the tours the company provides. The simplicity and subtleness of the website design lend itself to the brand’s mission to be creative but laconic, relying on the niche they take up and the audience they’re appealing to.

Thrillophilia: Simple and Effective Website Design

Thrillophilia is a travel agency website that offers a variety of extreme activities such as helicopter rides, paragliding, hot air balloon rides, bungee jumping, rafting, and many more. The landing page features CTAs that allow visitors to filter all the available destinations, activities, and locations and book the tour of their choice.

Thrillophilia makes the most of CTAs to hook and draw in users, and the platform also provides an impressive set of statistics on how well the company is doing, listing the number of users, travel experiences, and countries. The website design is simple and straightforward, with no flashy details or colors to detract attention from the numerous pages, CTAs, and blocks of information.

Getaway: The Role of UI/UX Design

Getaway is a travel agency website that provides an escape from the big city to a serene and worry-free break somewhere in the woods, far away from civilization. The website features loads of stunning photos, easy navigation tools, visible CTAs, and a calming color palette. The Getaway team also works on the Getaway Podcast, Getaway Book, Getaway Shop, and The Journal, providing insights, guides, and tips on how to stay sane and deal with modern life challenges.

Getaway offers a perfect solution for people who want to decompress in nature and reconnect with what matters most to them. The website’s design and content focus on providing a calming and relaxing user experience, with easy navigation tools and clear CTAs.

On a Final Note

Travel websites are often associated with overwhelming pop-ups, slow loading times, and excessive images. However, this doesn’t have to be the case. Ester Digital has compiled a list of the best travel website designs in 2023 that demonstrate the potential for travel websites to appeal to various audiences, whether they operate locally or globally, offer exclusive experiences, or cater to a broad range of interests.

There are endless ways to enhance a website’s design, including bold color palettes, informative CTAs, and creative visual arrangements. However, the design of a travel website should reflect the travel agency’s approach, whether it’s a small company or an industry leader. Clear and concise messaging is critical to ensure that travelers don’t end up disappointed with their trip after traveling thousands of miles.

If you’re unsure about how to create a successful travel website, the Ester Digital team is here to help. Contact us for assistance with designing and developing a platform that accurately represents your travel agency and appeals to your target audience.

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Travel: The Latest Architecture and News

Mirroring desert dunes, kpf's terminal a at zayed international airport opens in abu dhabi, uae.

The Abu Dhabi International Airport has been officially renamed Zayed International Airport , Terminal A. Designed and executed by KPF , the revamped complex will accommodate up to 45 million passengers annually, doubling the airport’s capacity. Informed by the desert's natural landscape and Islamic culture's geometric motifs, the terminal was designed considering the Emirate’s surrounding context.

• Read more »

Gensler and Moody Nolan Reveal Ohio's New Airport Terminal

As the fastest-growing metropolitan city in the Midwest region, Columbus is situated amidst Central Ohio’s exciting blend of infrastructure and natural landscape. Columbus and its surroundings are currently undergoing a significant phase of cultural expansion and anticipate a population surpassing 3 million by 2050. In collaboration with Columbus -based Moody Nolan , Gensler has just revealed their design for the new terminal at John Glenn Columbus International Airport in Ohio, a facility to grow the city and support it in reaching these goals of expansion.

European Cities Pass Regulations and Entrance Fees in Response to Tourist Overcrowding

Since pandemic-imposed restrictions have been lifted, Europe has experienced a surge in tourism, with millions of people visiting some of its most attractive destinations, such as Venice , Barcelona or Paris . The large number of visitors has proved to be a challenge for the cities, creating overcrowding and affecting the local population, urban development, and even the natural ecosystems surrounding the urban areas. In a bid to limit this influx, some of Europe’s most popular cities are taking various measures to address the overcrowding and the subsequent social and infrastructural issues. The measures include fines, entrance fees, and time-slot systems to impose some restrictions.

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng Wins 2023 Wheelwright Prize for her Study on the Impact of Sand on the Environment and Communities

Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) has announced Jingru (Cyan) Cheng as the recipient of the 2023 Wheelwright Prize , a study grant created to support globally-minded research and investigative approaches to contemporary architecture. The winning research project, titled “Tracing Sand: Phantom Territories, Bodies Adrift,” delves into the multifaceted impacts of sand mining and reclamation, understood from cultural, economic, and ecological perspectives. The unassuming material has become an indispensable element for our built environment and human communities, serving as a vital component in the production of glass, concrete, asphalt roads, and artificial land. Yet the process of dredging underwater systems and sand mining leads to the disruption of habitats in a process that simultaneously shapes one habitat while devastating another.

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A Balancing Act: How Architectural Tourism Can Be More Sustainable

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The first monograph of photographer Ryan Koopmans, an award winning Canadian/Dutch photographer whose work is exhibited and published across the world, Vantage explores the earth’s manmade structures, surreal architecture and megacities, evoking the insight and intrigue experienced from a travelling photographer’s perspective. Koopmans’ compelling photographs are presented alongside conversations with political leaders, business tycoons and local residents, providing a timeless vision of our world that is both contemporary and creative.

Marvin Heiferman, an independent curator and writer who originates projects about the impact of photographic images on art, visual culture and science, offers an insightful foreword.

With photographs shot on location in

Call for Proposals: 2020 International Garden Festival

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Métissages has historically had negative connotations.

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Why do we travel? In this edition of Editor's Talk , four editors from ArchDaily based in Lebanon, the United States, and Chile share their thoughts on the meaning of travel, and why tourists enjoying a beach in a location like Brazil should also care about the cities they visit.

Tokyo Travel Diary: Architecture and Manga

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The Age of Travel is Over

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Have Sweet Bauhaus Dreams in BauhausLand

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See the list below and start planning your excursion!

InVision Launches Free Study Abroad Program for Designers

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BUSINESS STRATEGIES

14 best travel and tourism websites to inspire your own

• Kylie Goldstein

While the pandemic affected many industries, it irrevocably changed the travel and tourism sector. As the World Economic Forum reports , “In 2020 alone, the [tourism] sector lost $4.5 trillion and 62 million jobs, impacting the living standards and well-being of communities across the globe. Moreover, the halt in international travel gave both leisure and business travelers the chance to consider the impact of their choices on the climate and environment.”

That being said, airline ticket prices are starting to rise again and airports are struggling to keep up with demand. Furthermore, amid current economic and environmental shifts, more travelers are seeking sustainable tourism options—and the industry has begun to adapt.

Whether you’re new to tourism—curating local experiences or renting out your home—or a travel veteran who has weathered the storm of tourism woes, there’s no better time to create a website for your tourism and travel types of businesses - its the perfect service business idea . We’ve compiled a list of some of the best travel websites, plus a few tips on what to include on your own.

Read Also: How to start a business

What is a tourism and travel website?

The tourism and travel industry has become more accessible than ever. The internet has made it easier to research, plan and book trips, all with just a few clicks. You can find everything from flights, hotels, and restaurants to car rentals and local experiences online.

A tourism or travel website serves as an information hub for prospective travelers planning a getaway. Today, people travel for a range of experiences—babymoons, staycations, voluntourism or bleisure—you name it. So, provide as much relevant information as possible to help users plan their trips.

When creating a travel website, entice travelers with blogs or video content that offers insider tips and local secrets. You can discuss practical information like local currency, customs and expectations, or review or rating popular destinations. You can also supply average local prices for travel necessities, offer tips for transportation or even add a Google Map of your favorite spots.

Tip: You can understand how to plan your website , then make your hotel website with Wix, complete with ready-made travel and tourism templates .

Best travel website examples

Let’s explore a range of tourism website examples, all built with Wix:

Inward Travel

Tourism Richmond Hill

Echo Fitness

African Empire Tours

Champlain Tours

Bella Vista

Home Sweet Home

Immanuel Wilderness Lodge

Sea Breeze Panormos

Jon's Carmel Marketing Cooking Class and Food Tour

The Berlin Storyteller

All Inclusive Vacations

Twende Zetu Kilimanjaro

01. Inward Travel

Creator Noå runs Inward Travel to “take the opportunity of lifelong learning, to improve quality of life and performance by consciousness and exercise.” The company curates unique cold water experiences, sweat-dripping-exercises and leadership trails in destinations like The Netherlands.

Inward Travel’s minimal one-page website highlights the relevant information clearly and concisely. The enticing video strip in the first fold of the website instantly paints a picture of the experiences offered. The simple color palette aligns with the brand messaging and the site effectively uses his logo, including the favicon.

02. Tourism Richmond Hill

Canadian-based Tourism Richmond Hill’s informative website includes thorough details for both locals and visitors alike, paired with eye-catching visuals and clear language. A clear menu leads users to navigation options like ‘restaurants around town,’ ‘where to stay,’ ‘things to do, and ‘useful links’. Additionally, their ‘Shop Local, Support Your Community,’ section expands their potential visitor pool, encouraging residents to treat their hometown like a tourist destination.

03. Echo Fitness

Don’t let the name fool you, Echo offers much more than just a fitness website . The homepage gives a brief description of all of Echo Fitness’s services, including active holidays, fitness retreats, personal training and ski instruction—all based in Zermatt, Switzerland—with clear CTAs to learn more. Each section includes a thorough description, complete with sample itineraries of previous trips or retreats. The travel website also gives a clear breakdown of plans and pricing, with a clear Book Now button for easy requests. Echo Fitness’s social media bar also includes a link to TripAdvisor, using this external platform to establish trust from previous travelers’ reviews.

Learn more: Travel business names

04. African Empire Tours

African Empire Tours immerses travelers in the culture, architecture and natural splendor of Asante, Kongo, Songhair, Zulu and Ethiopia. The tourism website clearly outlines the five tour destinations and gives a clear itinerary example.

African Empire Tours also smartly includes a clear Subscribe form above their contact information to engage with prospective travelers in the research/deciding phase of trip planning. Adding a subscribe form can help you keep visitors up to date on your business offerings.

05. Champlain Tours

Champlain Tours puts their pre-arranged group and customizable private tour options front and center, so prospective visitors can easily find what they want. They also include links to their social media profiles, including their YouTube channel which showcases video content of what visitors can expect when on tour with the company. They also prominently display previous travelers’ customer reviews as social proof to establish trust.

06. Japan Time

Japan Time’s Tom and Stav share their first-hand experiences with a range of thoughtful blogs, guides and tips for other travelers looking to make the most out of their experience. They break down the essentials like travel budget, transportation, food as well as holidays and cultural traditions in the land of the rising sun. The travel site also includes experiential tours like a “Culinary evening in Osaka” or “Ikebana techniques” that visitors can directly book online.

07. Bella Vista

Ciao Bella—arriving at Bella Vista’s vacation website offers an instant escape into the Sicilian countryside. Parallax scrolling brings the hotel to life; from a close up shot of a mouth-watering cannoli to the gorgeous view their property boasts, visitors will want to book a vacation and sign up for Italian lessons, too. This is one of the best hotel websites we've come across, as the captivating photos take you on a beautiful Italian getaway.

08. Home Sweet Home

Sometimes when vacation planning, you want a home away from home rather than a big to-do. Well, at France’s Home Sweet Home, you can choose from three uniquely styled rooms fit for comfort, relaxation and fun. Take a closer look at the photo gallery for every room and start to feel that vacation vibe seep in. Our favorite part? Their on-site private spa services.

09. Immanuel Wilderness Lodge

For those seeking adventure, consider Immanuel Wilderness Lodge, located in the Namibian Savannah. This family-run lodge has earned a collection of rave reviews and well-deserved TripAdvisor awards. For those who prefer to know exactly what to expect before arriving, their amazing 360° virtual tours show off their accommodations, lobby, restaurant and surrounding property.

10. Sea Breeze Panormos

Is there anything more exotic than a Greek vacation? After browsing their travel website, you’ll know why the four properties comprising Sea Breeze of Mykonos offer a quintessential vacation spot. Look at the romantic views, pristine accommodations and learn about what this magical island offers.

Using a teal Book Now button pops out amid the muted gray background, helping users know exactly what to do upon entering the site.

11. Jon’s Carmel Market Cooking Class and Food Tour

Almost any traveler to Tel Aviv knows that a visit to the Carmel Market is a must. Jon’s Carmel Market Cooking Class and Food Tour’s clear and direct website makes it incredibly easy for travelers to navigate through the famously bustling market. Jon, the owner, includes a short, captivating video that lets visitors know what a typical day in the market looks like. He also provides a detailed itinerary and a strategically placed CTA for Book Now.

Jon also uses a Wix pro gallery to showcase the vibrant colors and flavors of the food market. His contact information is easy to find, and includes links to all his social channels, including his TripAdvisor rating.

12. The Berlin Storyteller

Dennis Behnke, a Berlin native offers his tour services and in his own words, “Be it on foot and public transportation, be it on bike or in a van, let me help you create your perfect Berlin private tour.” His thoughtful and well-organized tourism website includes a clear list of his unique tours with detailed descriptions and lengths. Behnke has native experience and insights into the diverse city.

He includes his TripAdvisor rating directly on his homepage alongside a personalized explanation of his experiences, effectively reinforcing his brand name as the Berlin Storyteller. Working as an independent tour guide is a great service business idea. It can be a great side hustle or full-time venture if you have detailed knowledge of a city or specific destination.

13. All Inclusive Vacations

This travel website asks users a simple yet profound question upon entry—where to? For those who connect with this spark of wanderlust, there’s a relevant questionnaire to fill out and to receive a range of all-inclusive vacation packages.

This travel website also offers visitors drone video content, providing a bird-eye’s view and immersive look into each exotic getaway. In addition, All Inclusive Vacations includes their team’s photos, letting prospective travelers know who they’re talking to while planning their trips. A chatbot provides instant responses and efficiently handles incoming questions as well.

14. Twende Zetu Kilimanjaro

For hikers looking to experience iconic Mount Kilimanjaro, this travel website offers practical information including medical details, experiential knowledge, trip schedules and trail guides. Users can easily navigate the clearly laid-out information, helping them to understand the most relevant information before such an exciting hike.

What to include in a tourism and travel website

Every tourism or travel website will vary depending on the destination and target visitor. However, most travel websites should include the following:

Easy-to-use scheduling software

High-quality photography and images

Relevant information about nearby attractions—including museums, arts, cultural events, restaurants and shopping

Packing advice

Maps and directions

Public transportation information (note if users need to download apps in advance)

Air travel and airport information

Language guidelines and local slang

Clear links to social media channels

Contact information

Reviews or testimonials

An online store to buy branded or local merchandise (use an online store builder  for this)

Ready to create a blog  for your travel website?  Make one today. Or read more about how to start a travel blog .

Travel and tourism website design tips

Whether you have created a hotel website  starting from scratch or you are updating your current travel website, keep these design tips in mind.

Include a logo.  A logo can help establish consistency for your brand’s online presence. A good logo should communicate the crux of your destination, tour company or rental and help visitors make a positive association with your business before they even arrive. You can use a free logo maker  to design a logo for your travel website, plus use it for business cards, brochures, branded merchandise and social media channels.

Ensure a cohesive design.  Select a representative color palette for your brand and stick to it throughout your travel website’s visual identity. For example, if you run a natural spa getaway, stick to tranquil and calming colors over rugged and earthy tones that better match an extreme sports tour guide. With Wix’s editor's site and theme design , you can customize your website colors, fonts and images and maintain a cohesive look with automatic theme updates across your site’s pages. Also check out some of these general website examples  for inspiration.

Use images.  For prospective travelers planning their future getaways, high-quality images can immediately transport them to your destination. We recommend ​​using  JPEG ,  PNG  and GIF files for images to appear their best on your site.

Don’t overload pages.  Travel is all about the escape. Make your site’s user experience just as relaxing as traveling should be—don’t overload it with superfluous content or features. Tip:  Build your travel website with Wix website performance  at its core. Sites offer better page load speed plus Wix’s site speed dashboard  to test, analyze and optimize your site’s performance for both desktop and mobile.

Think about site hierarchy.  As visitors explore your site, you want them to receive relevant information and experience your offering efficiently. Prioritize your main pages and create menus, headers and subheaders that clearly reflect this hierarchy. Not only will this create a better user experience (and hopefully convert visitors to customers), but it will also make it easier for Google’s search engine robots to scan and index your pages.

Make it mobile friendly.  Mobile accounts for approximately half  of web traffic worldwide, meaning potentially half (or more) of visitors will explore your website via their devices. Creating a mobile-friendly travel and tourism website will ensure a better experience, regardless of device. Tip:  The Wix Editor automatically creates a mobile version for every website  it designs.

Lean into templates : Templates are a great way to create a design-friendly travel and tourism website in an efficient way. Here's a selection of our favorite travel and tourism templates from Wix: Travel services templates , Travel agency template , Food and travel website templates , Travel blog template , Travel documentary templates , Hotel and BnB website templates.

Consider SEO.  If you optimize your travel website content to rank on search engines, you can increase your traffic. How? First, target specific keywords. For example, think of your prospective travelers: what questions or phrases might they search for that could lead them to your tourism website? Integrate these keywords into your website content. Tip:  Check out Wix SEO features  or the Wix SEO hub  for more detailed steps that’ll help your travel website perform better on search engines.

Maintain your travel website . Just as you care for your hotel or tours, you need to apply the same TLC to your website. Fresh and up-to-date content (like prices and current links) can help users get the most out of their experience.

Try out new technologies.  Following the latest travel technology trends , try integrating a chat bot for quick responses and user engagement or use 3D/AR viewer  to give users a virtual tour of your destination.

Travel and tourism websites FAQ

What are some famous examples of travel websites.

There are many: Skyscanner, AirBnb, Kayak amongst others.

What are the different types of travel websites to create

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Information architecture design for travel website using top-down approach on card sorting method

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Ulfah Ranida Sari , Mira Kania Sabariah , Veronikha Effendy; Information architecture design for travel website using top-down approach on card sorting method. AIP Conf. Proc. 26 June 2018; 1977 (1): 030027. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5042947

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The emergence of global web has affected the ways companies and entrepreneurs conveying information and communicating with the public. The travel industry is no exception. Travel website as the object of this study is perceived as less fulfilling in relation with the needs of the web users on the structure of the menu and the delivery of information. It is supported by the results of questionnaires that have been distributed to the respondents of this study. Therefore, the design of Information Architecture (IA) of the travel website was done by involving organizations and users and the usability of the produced IA on the website was analyzed. IA design was done by using a top-down approach on card sorting method, while the process of card sorting was done by doing closed card sort. Tests on the prototype used a Heuristic Evaluation method with the assessment system used severity ratings. The tests involved three evaluators. Evaluators performed testing by using usability guidelines that only focus on IA. From the test results, there were seventeen usability guidelines with an average value of 0 out of the 20 usability guidelines used in this study. This value indicates the absence of problem found in the tested prototype. In overall, the website can work appropriately because it already meets the required usability.

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10 Tips on how to travel as an architect

Travel is a powerful tool in shaping the perception of the modern world. It plays an ever-growing role in architectural and urban cultures. Inextricably linked to political and ideological issues, travel redefines places and landscapes through buildings and infrastructure.

We all have experienced memorable trips, ones we recall seeing the pictures or souvenirs stuck on our refrigerators. The art of travelling is exploring the city to its maximum , and by doing so one gets the essence of the city or place, which helps him to connect even better with the architecture, especially for the architects. Through visual and textual narratives, Architecture is reconstructed by modern travellers — including writers and artists along with architects themselves. In the age of the camera, and mobile phone, travel is bound up with new kinds of imaginaries and private records and the value of architectural heritage increasingly rests on the images. To learn architectural history, students often go through image collections.

Being an architect, imagination and exploration is the key of design. There are certain ways in which one can travel as an architect.

Architects can get a chance to travel instead of just sitting in an office and working for hours.

Here are 10 tips for architects to travel:

1. Learning From Forms and Style of Architecture:  

History and architecture style are some of the interesting topics to learn while travelling and it helps to connect with the real-time experience in that place. The basic features of any structure or a building which are notable and historically identified characterises the architectural style. For example, colonial, gothic, baroque, ancient roman, neoclassical, Ismalic architecture are some of the most inspiring and timeless works of architecture.    

2. Attain Knowledge: 

Travel is the best way to gather knowledge about details like construction techniques, materials, different terrains and design concepts of the place. When one gets the idea of the place’s culture, it does definitely help in bringing in good design concepts and introducing new ideas to the projects architects are working on, expanding the knowledge. 

3. Explore The Unexpected:  

Giving the true sense of exposure, travelling widens up the knowledge with fresh ideas, one gets inspired by the place, landscape, culture, people and of course, the built spaces. Until and unless places are being explored, they won’t be known to the world, which an architect can opt for, be it extremes like people living in really hot deserts or cold mountains. Understanding the originality of the designs, making an architect an empathetic designer with whom clients can connect easily.

4. Save Money:  

Setting priorities and saving money can help architects to achieve their dream to travel the world. Creating a savings plan and setting goals by committing to the dream is one of the ways to travel without worries. While travelling, spend less on fancy restaurants and stay places so that the cost can be recovered in the commute to explore other places.

5. Freelancer Jobs:  

Being your own boss is the best thing, isn’t it? Writing architectural vlogs, taking up jobs that offer travel opportunities, doing freelancing architect’s jobs in various cities and countries can provide good opportunities to explore and travel places.

Below are a few websites you can refer for the same: -Fiverr -Upwork -Freelancer.in -Envato Studio -PeoplePerHour -Indeed.co.in

6. Travel Influencer: 

Social media is trending these days, becoming an influencer can grow up your career as fast as possible. Sharing your experience and creating a blog or a travel page of the places you visit can eventually become an earning medium. Share with the world your travel story and experience and create unique content for your page on Instagram and  Facebook, and even write about them for journals and publications.

Start to develop strong storytelling skills and influence your followers through your travel content.

7. Participate in Architectural Competitions in Different Countries : 

There are many grounds which provide opportunities to participate in competitions that offer prized travel tours and student scholarships. This is a great chance to make international contacts and connections and you never know, you might end up having an international architectural job offer.

8. Architectural Photography And Sketches:  

The best way to observe details in a building is to sketch it out. It’s tough to slow down in tourist places and popular tourist spots, but try to take a moment, find a spot, pull out your sketchbook and pen and learn to look at the building in a whole new way. On the other hand, if a camera is what you are good at, grab one and capture great architectural pictures on your trips. Document the trip by clicking beautiful pictures of creative spaces with various splendid angles and making videos of the journey, you never know you might end up working as a professional architectural photographer who can travel as much as possible and be hired for some great publications.

9. Experience The Building By Observing, Walking Around And The Sense Of Touch:

Walking around in the building, identifying spaces and routes, architectural elements, connects you more with the built space. Observing people and their response towards the building, and observing minute details while travelling can give you some thoughtful design ideas which can be applied in the projects. Materials and textures like hand-painted tiles in the Portuguese facade, rough engraved letters of the bronze doors at Sagrada Familia, cool marble threshold at Hagia Sophia, these textures will always remain with you when touched upon. Sometimes we mistakenly treat buildings like works of art, not touched and sensed upon.

10. Have A Bucket List Which Just To Keep You Motivated For Future Travel Plans:

To end it, all you have got is to explore our travel limits is to have a bucket list and try the best ways to mark each one of them and be motivated. 

Diksha is an architecture graduate from Nirma University, 2020. Being an avid traveler, she has always tried to connect the city's culture with architecture. She is a keen observer, finds inspiration from unexplored places and believes that true essence of architecture lies in its execution (form generation) and user experience.

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Now You Can Travel the World with an Architect as Your Guide

By Sara Tardiff

Photography by Architectural Adventures

No one knows the ins and outs of a city quite like a local, be it the food, art, or nightlife. With Architectural Adventures , a travel program recently launched by the American Institute of Architects , travelers with a passion for culture, history, and particularly architecture can embark on trips expertly curated by those who know the cityscape best: local architects. The first trip, “Havana Revealed”—kicking off in Cuba on March 10—features a walking tour through the vibrant streets of Old Havana, a closer look at a 16th-century stone fortress, and a visit to a historic architecture restoration factory. Other trips for 2017 include tours of Chicago, Northern Italy, and China. AD spoke with Luke Diorio, a managing director at AIA, on what travelers can look forward to when booking with Architectural Adventures.

Architectural Digest: How did the concept for Architectural Adventures develop?

Luke Diorio: For years the AIA has led trips for its members to various parts of the world to examine and promote knowledge of design issues and to encourage a global dialogue on the art of building and design. Architectural Adventures provides these travelers distinctive and exclusive opportunities to engage with the past, present, and future of building and design in the world’s greatest sites and cities through a full series of immersive, architecture-centered travel experiences featuring knowledgeable and engaging experts. This means both a world-class vacation and a unique opportunity to learn about the built environment in breathtaking settings around the globe.

AD: Who are you hoping will travel with Architectural Adventures?

LD: Architectural Adventures is a special program of the American Institute of Architects, and while we hope that many of our 90,000-plus members choose to travel with our program, it is not just for our members. The program is open to anyone—especially those who are architecture enthusiasts and world travelers.

The boldly colored buildings in Cuba's Old Havana.

AD: How were the destinations and architectural sites chosen?

LD: First and foremost, we started by considering global destinations that would offer a rich architectural experience for our travelers. We then surveyed prospective travelers to gain an understanding of how this matched their interests. Once our destinations were selected and an expert was identified, the team worked with the expert, the tour operator, and often the local AIA chapter to develop the trip itinerary and details.

The canals of Northern Italy will eventually be included on the AIA-sponsored tours.

AD: What do you hope for travelers to take away from their trip with Architectural Adventures?

LD: It is our hope that travelers experience something unique at each of our destinations, providing a deeper appreciation of the culture, history, and architecture—especially through special excursions and exclusive behind-the-scenes access to popular sites. Our program manages every detail of the trip, allowing travelers to focus on the culture and architecture in a small group atmosphere with like-minded travelers.

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5 Websites about Architecture Travel

by Christopher Brinckerhoff, associate editor

Are you traveling this summer? Unless you’re going on a wilderness expedition, chances are good there will be opportunities to enjoy some architecture site seeing. There is an abundant selection of websites with information about landmarks, local history, contemporary buildings and other topics connected with architecture travel. Here’s a list of five sites to begin.

• a View on Cities is a good starting point because it has an extensive collection of basic building information including locations. The site features bits of information including construction date, materials and square footage.
• MIMOA is an architecture guide that features short descriptions, addresses and maps of contemporary architecture including interiors, parks, public places, buildings and bridges. Simple search tools navigate visitors through more than 8,000 projects by location, project type, completion date and whether it is a public or non-public building.
• ArchiTravel invites users to share information and experiences from past travels with text, pictures, maps and descriptions of significant buildings. Search by city, project name, architect, project category or keyword to find or research places.
• ArchDaily’s Architecture City Guides include pictures, maps and information about significant architecture in for than 40 municipalities, most in the U.S.
• News media websites are another good source of information about architecture travel. You can find more information about a smaller number of destinations on these sites. The New York Times and the BBC are two sites with sections devoted to architecture travel.

There are many other information sources about architecture travel including books, apps for mobile devices, blogs, historical society websites and lists of historic landmarks. You’re welcome to share those you know about in the comments below.

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Published: 5 April 2024 Contributors: Tim Mucci, Cole Stryker

Big data analytics refers to the systematic processing and analysis of large amounts of data and complex data sets, known as big data, to extract valuable insights. Big data analytics allows for the uncovering of trends, patterns and correlations in large amounts of raw data to help analysts make data-informed decisions. This process allows organizations to leverage the exponentially growing data generated from diverse sources, including internet-of-things (IoT) sensors, social media, financial transactions and smart devices to derive actionable intelligence through advanced analytic techniques.

In the early 2000s, advances in software and hardware capabilities made it possible for organizations to collect and handle large amounts of unstructured data. With this explosion of useful data, open-source communities developed big data frameworks to store and process this data. These frameworks are used for distributed storage and processing of large data sets across a network of computers. Along with additional tools and libraries, big data frameworks can be used for:

• Predictive modeling by incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) and statistical algorithms
• Statistical analysis for in-depth data exploration and to uncover hidden patterns
• What-if analysis to simulate different scenarios and explore potential outcomes
• Processing diverse data sets, including structured, semi-structured and unstructured data from various sources.

Four main data analysis methods  – descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive  – are used to uncover insights and patterns within an organization's data. These methods facilitate a deeper understanding of market trends, customer preferences and other important business metrics.

IBM named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Augmented Data Quality Solutions.

Structured vs unstructured data

What is data management?

The main difference between big data analytics and traditional data analytics is the type of data handled and the tools used to analyze it. Traditional analytics deals with structured data, typically stored in relational databases . This type of database helps ensure that data is well-organized and easy for a computer to understand. Traditional data analytics relies on statistical methods and tools like structured query language (SQL) for querying databases.

Big data analytics involves massive amounts of data in various formats, including structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. The complexity of this data requires more sophisticated analysis techniques. Big data analytics employs advanced techniques like machine learning and data mining to extract information from complex data sets. It often requires distributed processing systems like Hadoop to manage the sheer volume of data.

These are the four methods of data analysis at work within big data:

The "what happened" stage of data analysis. Here, the focus is on summarizing and describing past data to understand its basic characteristics.

The “why it happened” stage. By delving deep into the data, diagnostic analysis identifies the root patterns and trends observed in descriptive analytics.

The “what will happen” stage. It uses historical data, statistical modeling and machine learning to forecast trends.

Describes the “what to do” stage, which goes beyond prediction to provide recommendations for optimizing future actions based on insights derived from all previous.

The following dimensions highlight the core challenges and opportunities inherent in big data analytics.

The sheer volume of data generated today, from social media feeds, IoT devices, transaction records and more, presents a significant challenge. Traditional data storage and processing solutions are often inadequate to handle this scale efficiently. Big data technologies and cloud-based storage solutions enable organizations to store and manage these vast data sets cost-effectively, protecting valuable data from being discarded due to storage limitations.

Data is being produced at unprecedented speeds, from real-time social media updates to high-frequency stock trading records. The velocity at which data flows into organizations requires robust processing capabilities to capture, process and deliver accurate analysis in near real-time. Stream processing frameworks and in-memory data processing are designed to handle these rapid data streams and balance supply with demand.

Today's data comes in many formats, from structured to numeric data in traditional databases to unstructured text, video and images from diverse sources like social media and video surveillance. This variety demans flexible data management systems to handle and integrate disparate data types for comprehensive analysis. NoSQL databases , data lakes and schema -on-read technologies provide the necessary flexibility to accommodate the diverse nature of big data.

Data reliability and accuracy are critical, as decisions based on inaccurate or incomplete data can lead to negative outcomes. Veracity refers to the data's trustworthiness, encompassing data quality, noise and anomaly detection issues. Techniques and tools for data cleaning, validation and verification are integral to ensuring the integrity of big data, enabling organizations to make better decisions based on reliable information.

Big data analytics aims to extract actionable insights that offer tangible value. This involves turning vast data sets into meaningful information that can inform strategic decisions, uncover new opportunities and drive innovation. Advanced analytics, machine learning and AI are key to unlocking the value contained within big data, transforming raw data into strategic assets.

Data professionals, analysts, scientists and statisticians prepare and process data in a data lakehouse, which combines the performance of a data lakehouse with the flexibility of a data lake to clean data and ensure its quality. The process of turning raw data into valuable insights encompasses several key stages:

• Collect data: The first step involves gathering data, which can be a mix of structured and unstructured forms from myriad sources like cloud, mobile applications and IoT sensors. This step is where organizations adapt their data collection strategies and integrate data from varied sources into central repositories like a data lake, which can automatically assign metadata for better manageability and accessibility.
• Process data: After being collected, data must be systematically organized, extracted, transformed and then loaded into a storage system to ensure accurate analytical outcomes. Processing involves converting raw data into a format that is usable for analysis, which might involve aggregating data from different sources, converting data types or organizing data into structure formats. Given the exponential growth of available data, this stage can be challenging. Processing strategies may vary between batch processing, which handles large data volumes over extended periods and stream processing, which deals with smaller real-time data batches.
• Clean data: Regardless of size, data must be cleaned to ensure quality and relevance. Cleaning data involves formatting it correctly, removing duplicates and eliminating irrelevant entries. Clean data prevents the corruption of output and safeguard’s reliability and accuracy.
• Analyze data: Advanced analytics, such as data mining, predictive analytics, machine learning and deep learning, are employed to sift through the processed and cleaned data. These methods allow users to discover patterns, relationships and trends within the data, providing a solid foundation for informed decision-making.

Under the Analyze umbrella, there are potentially many technologies at work, including data mining, which is used to identify patterns and relationships within large data sets; predictive analytics, which forecasts future trends and opportunities; and deep learning , which mimics human learning patterns to uncover more abstract ideas.

Deep learning uses an artificial neural network with multiple layers to model complex patterns in data. Unlike traditional machine learning algorithms, deep learning learns from images, sound and text without manual help. For big data analytics, this powerful capability means the volume and complexity of data is not an issue.

Natural language processing (NLP) models allow machines to understand, interpret and generate human language. Within big data analytics, NLP extracts insights from massive unstructured text data generated across an organization and beyond.

Structured Data

Structured data refers to highly organized information that is easily searchable and typically stored in relational databases or spreadsheets. It adheres to a rigid schema, meaning each data element is clearly defined and accessible in a fixed field within a record or file. Examples of structured data include:

• Customer names and addresses in a customer relationship management (CRM) system
• Transactional data in financial records, such as sales figures and account balances
• Employee data in human resources databases, including job titles and salaries

Structured data's main advantage is its simplicity for entry, search and analysis, often using straightforward database queries like SQL. However, the rapidly expanding universe of big data means that structured data represents a relatively small portion of the total data available to organizations.

Unstructured Data

Unstructured data lacks a pre-defined data model, making it more difficult to collect, process and analyze. It comprises the majority of data generated today, and includes formats such as:

• Textual content from documents, emails and social media posts
• Multimedia content, including images, audio files and videos
• Data from IoT devices, which can include a mix of sensor data, log files and time-series data

The primary challenge with unstructured data is its complexity and lack of uniformity, requiring more sophisticated methods for indexing, searching and analyzing. NLP, machine learning and advanced analytics platforms are often employed to extract meaningful insights from unstructured data.

Semi-structured data

Semi-structured data occupies the middle ground between structured and unstructured data. While it does not reside in a relational database, it contains tags or other markers to separate semantic elements and enforce hierarchies of records and fields within the data. Examples include:

• JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and XML (eXtensible Markup Language) files, which are commonly used for web data interchange
• Email, where the data has a standardized format (e.g., headers, subject, body) but the content within each section is unstructured
• NoSQL databases, can store and manage semi-structured data more efficiently than traditional relational databases

Semi-structured data is more flexible than structured data but easier to analyze than unstructured data, providing a balance that is particularly useful in web applications and data integration tasks.

Ensuring data quality and integrity, integrating disparate data sources, protecting data privacy and security and finding the right talent to analyze and interpret data can present challenges to organizations looking to leverage their extensive data volumes. What follows are the benefits organizations can realize once they see success with big data analytics:

Real-time intelligence

One of the standout advantages of big data analytics is the capacity to provide real-time intelligence. Organizations can analyze vast amounts of data as it is generated from myriad sources and in various formats. Real-time insight allows businesses to make quick decisions, respond to market changes instantaneously and identify and act on opportunities as they arise.

Better-informed decisions

With big data analytics, organizations can uncover previously hidden trends, patterns and correlations. A deeper understanding equips leaders and decision-makers with the information needed to strategize effectively, enhancing business decision-making in supply chain management, e-commerce, operations and overall strategic direction.  

Cost savings

Big data analytics drives cost savings by identifying business process efficiencies and optimizations. Organizations can pinpoint wasteful expenditures by analyzing large datasets, streamlining operations and enhancing productivity. Moreover, predictive analytics can forecast future trends, allowing companies to allocate resources more efficiently and avoid costly missteps.

Better customer engagement

Understanding customer needs, behaviors and sentiments is crucial for successful engagement and big data analytics provides the tools to achieve this understanding. Companies gain insights into consumer preferences and tailor their marketing strategies by analyzing customer data.

Optimized risk management strategies

Big data analytics enhances an organization's ability to manage risk by providing the tools to identify, assess and address threats in real time. Predictive analytics can foresee potential dangers before they materialize, allowing companies to devise preemptive strategies.

As organizations across industries seek to leverage data to drive decision-making, improve operational efficiencies and enhance customer experiences, the demand for skilled professionals in big data analytics has surged. Here are some prominent career paths that utilize big data analytics:

Data scientist

Data scientists analyze complex digital data to assist businesses in making decisions. Using their data science training and advanced analytics technologies, including machine learning and predictive modeling, they uncover hidden insights in data.

Data analyst

Data analysts turn data into information and information into insights. They use statistical techniques to analyze and extract meaningful trends from data sets, often to inform business strategy and decisions.

Data engineer

Data engineers prepare, process and manage big data infrastructure and tools. They also develop, maintain, test and evaluate data solutions within organizations, often working with massive datasets to assist in analytics projects.

Machine learning engineer

Machine learning engineers focus on designing and implementing machine learning applications. They develop sophisticated algorithms that learn from and make predictions on data.

Business intelligence analyst

Business intelligence (BI) analysts help businesses make data-driven decisions by analyzing data to produce actionable insights. They often use BI tools to convert data into easy-to-understand reports and visualizations for business stakeholders.

Data visualization specialist

These specialists focus on the visual representation of data. They create data visualizations that help end users understand the significance of data by placing it in a visual context.

Data architect

Data architects design, create, deploy and manage an organization's data architecture. They define how data is stored, consumed, integrated and managed by different data entities and IT systems.

IBM and Cloudera have partnered to create an industry-leading, enterprise-grade big data framework distribution plus a variety of cloud services and products — all designed to achieve faster analytics at scale.

IBM Db2 Database on IBM Cloud Pak for Data combines a proven, AI-infused, enterprise-ready data management system with an integrated data and AI platform built on the security-rich, scalable Red Hat OpenShift foundation.

IBM Big Replicate is an enterprise-class data replication software platform that keeps data consistent in a distributed environment, on-premises and in the hybrid cloud, including SQL and NoSQL databases.

A data warehouse is a system that aggregates data from different sources into a single, central, consistent data store to support data analysis, data mining, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Business intelligence gives organizations the ability to get answers they can understand. Instead of using best guesses, they can base decisions on what their business data is telling them — whether it relates to production, supply chain, customers or market trends.

Cloud computing is the on-demand access of physical or virtual servers, data storage, networking capabilities, application development tools, software, AI analytic tools and more—over the internet with pay-per-use pricing. The cloud computing model offers customers flexibility and scalability compared to traditional infrastructure.

Purpose-built data-driven architecture helps support business intelligence across the organization. IBM analytics solutions allow organizations to simplify raw data access, provide end-to-end data management and empower business users with AI-driven self-service analytics to predict outcomes.

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Discover Le Havre, Where Impressionism Was Born

The movement was named for a seascape Monet painted in this often-overlooked city, France’s largest seaport. But it has a museum full of Impressionist canvases, intriguing architecture and a new energy.

By Elaine Sciolino

As the fog of dawn lifted one morning in mid-November 1872, Claude Monet looked out the window of his hotel room in the French city of Le Havre and furiously painted his vision of its industrial harbor. He flung his brush with quick strokes and played with the water, stretching it with rays of color.

In one sitting, he created “Impression, Sunrise,” a painting of a vivid orange sun with its reflection shimmering in the sea.

In 1874, Monet, who grew up in Le Havre on the Normandy coast, included the painting in an exhibition of 30 artists’ work organized in response to the Paris Salon, an annual showcase of academic art. The critic Louis Leroy denounced “The Exhibition of the Impressionists” and mocked the title of Monet’s painting. “An impression, I’m sure,” he wrote. “I thought to myself, this has made an impression on me so there must be impressions somewhere in there.”

Impressionism was born.

This year, France is celebrating the 150th anniversary of the movement. In Paris, the Musée d’Orsay is exhibiting 130 works from and related to the 1874 exhibition and offering a one-hour immersive tour with virtual reality headsets. It is sending 178 other works to more than 30 museums throughout France.

The Musée Marmottan , which owns “Impression, Sunrise,” has agreed to lend it to the Orsay until July for its exhibition “Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism” and to the National Gallery in Washington where the exhibition travels in September.

But to discover a fresh and unexpected view of Impressionism requires a visit to Le Havre, France’s most important seaport and its most underappreciated big city.

Snubbed by tourists

Once there was a direct New York-to-Le Havre route on the French Line, whose luxury cruise liners pampered rich Americans with fancy suites and fine French cuisine. Le Havre was their first point of entry into the Old World.

But in more recent times, cruises and tour operators preferred to take their passengers to the Normandy beaches and to charming, quaint Honfleur on the other side of the Seine estuary, rather than to gritty Le Havre. Even today, many Parisians have never visited.

“It used to be that people who came from Le Havre rarely admitted it,” said Édouard Philippe, the mayor of Le Havre and a former French prime minister, in an interview. “People made fun of them. A bit like how people from New Jersey got used to being made fun of because they lived on industrial land that was less beautiful than New York. That all changed. Le Havre is now in fashion.”

To prove his point, he picked up a coffee mug with an intersecting L and H — the new emblem of Le Havre that adorns products — like T-shirts and tote bags — sold throughout the city.

It’s worth a trip to Le Havre just to visit the Musée d’Art Moderne André Malraux , which opened in 1961.

With its white walls, steel frame and floor-to-ceiling glass facade that gives a view out to the sea, the museum allows visitors to revel in the light — luminous and somber — produced by the fickle weather of Normandy. A second-floor balcony that looks out over the museum’s outdoor esplanade and the sea adds to the feeling of openness.

“There was a desire from the beginning to make the museum open to the great spectacle of the changing elements outside,” said Géraldine Lefebvre, the museum’s director.

MuMa, as it is called, has arguably the most important collection of Impressionist paintings in France outside the Musée d’Orsay ( Rouen’s Musée des Beaux-Arts makes the same claim). MuMa’s collection is also home to some of the world’s most famous paintings from the Fauvist movement that followed. And unlike the gridlocked Orsay, MuMa is always gloriously undervisited.

“Go to the Orsay, and then come here,” said Ms. Lefebvre. “We battle a little with Rouen, but in terms of the numbers of works and their quality, we are No. 2.”

Ms. Lefebvre has studied and written about Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise.” She worked for a year with Donald Olson, a Texas State University astronomer and physics professor who used topographical, meteorological and astrological studies to calculate the precise date and time of its creation. According to Dr. Olson, she said, Monet painted it at 7:35 a.m. on Nov. 13, 1872.

The Hotel de l’Amirauté, where Monet stayed when he painted “Impression, Sunrise,” is long gone — replaced by a modern apartment building with a bar-bistro and a gift shop on the ground floor.

Ms. Lefebvre and I visited the site, and she captured the scene: “It was winter; the temperature was freezing. The wind was blowing from the west. The light was just coming up from the sea. The moment the sun came up, he worked in one great burst of energy.”

Rebuilt after World War II

Le Havre is not an ancient city like Paris. When the French king François I created the port of Le Havre in 1517, priority was to create “un havre” — a harbor — that would serve as both a military site to protect France from invaders and a commercial port to open Paris to the world. The city was an afterthought.

Trade exploded over time. Wealthy merchants built grand homes in the coastal town of Sainte-Adresse, northwest of Le Havre.

In August 1944, the British Air Force rained bombs on the city and its inhabitants; 2,000 civilians were killed, 80,000 were left homeless and more than 80 percent of the city was destroyed.

In the 1950s, the French architect Auguste Perret , working with a tight budget and on a deadline, oversaw Le Havre’s reconstruction. A master of precast concrete, he used the cheap, plentiful material to build 150 residential blocks with identical modular frames, a rectangular grid system of streets, and wide sidewalks and boulevards. All the apartments had central heat and modern appliances.

The buildings once were considered ugly. At first glance, they all look alike; then you discover that the concrete came in different shades — creamy beige, gray, taupe, khaki, terra-cotta, ocher — and that the geometric columns and beams were finished with varying patterns and textures (from mottled stone to a smooth velvety feel).

“My concrete is more beautiful than stone,” Perret said. “I work it, I chisel it.”

Perret’s geometric architecture has aged well, and midcentury design is now chic. In 2005, Le Havre was the first example of French Modern architecture to achieve UNESCO World Heritage classification , cited as a model of urban experimentation and reconstruction. (Visitors can take a guided tour of a model apartment in a Perret building .)

Perret’s St. Joseph’s Church , completed in 1957, three years after his death, soars to 350 feet and resembles a small-scale New York City skyscraper. Concrete columns rise to angled buttresses and an octagonal cupola. The steeple is lined with more than 12,000 panes of stained glass.

Inside the church, Philippe Mariette, a retired architect who knew Perret, told me to look up at the reflections from the colored panels that dance on the unadorned walls. “No matter how many times I lift my head, I am always astonished,” he said.

A transformed city center

Le Havre has undergone an architectural transformation in recent years. In the center of town is Le Volcan , a partly underground complex designed by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. It consists of a volcano-shaped theater and a smaller crater converted into a library — with quirky seating pods that are great for kids. On the waterfront is Les Bains des Docks , a swimming complex and spa with pools, hammams, Jacuzzis and solariums designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel; inspired by ancient Roman baths, it is covered in 32 million tiny mosaic tiles. Nearby is the Docks Vauban , a mall with a cinema, restaurants and high-end boutiques.

There is one place in Le Havre that captures the city in time. The Maison de l’Armateur , the mansion of a family of shipowners-merchants and now a museum, is one of the city’s only surviving buildings from the 18th century, with a facade sculpted in Louis XVI style.

Wedged between tall buildings on the quay facing the port, where fishing boats and ferries are moored, it is designed like a tower around an octagonal light shaft and skylight, with rooms on five levels, including the ground floor, where a warehouse and stables were located. The house contains living quarters, a study, portraits, cabinets of curiosities, a library, a map room and a kitchen — all evoking the daily life of the bourgeoisie.

A garden where Monet painted

In the summer of 1867, while visiting his aunt in Sainte-Adresse, Monet painted “Garden at Sainte-Adresse,” which now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

“People know Sainte-Adresse because of the painting,” said François Rosset, a longtime resident who is president of its heritage association. “It’s a formidable vehicle for our town.”

Years ago, Sainte-Adresse refused to give up its independent status and become part of Le Havre. But a three-mile pedestrian and biking trail along the waterfront connects the town and the center of Le Havre. Part of the town was destroyed during the bombings, but many of the old estates on the outskirts were untouched.

Monet’s aunt’s house, which is privately owned, stays empty for much of the year. The main gate to the garden entrance was open on the day I visited. An employee on the grounds let me in for a peek at the site, with its red brick house with white shutters. .

Hubert Dejan de la Bâtie, the mayor of Sainte-Adresse, has dreams of buying and renovating the house and transforming the area into a tourist attraction.

“Maybe I can’t do as well as Giverny,” he said in an interview, referring to the house where Monet lived for 43 years. “But Monet spent his childhood in Le Havre, and maybe we can do a second center for Monet tourism here. We just have to make the project sexy.”

The train from Paris to Le Havre takes approximately 2 hours and 10 minutes. One-way tickets start from an average of €16 (or about $17) when booked in advance through SNCF Connect .

Hôtel Vent d’Ouest Le Havre is in the city center, across the street from St. Joseph Church, a four-minute walk from the harbor and a seven-minute walk from Le Volcan. Cozy and refined country-style décor. Rooms start at €117.

Hôtel Mercure Le Havre Centre Bassin du Commerce , an ultramodern hotel with décor inspired by the port’s containers, is centrally located only a 15-minute walk from the Maison de l’Armateur and MuMa, and a 10-minute walk from the railway station. Rooms start at €98.

Le Bistrot des Halles offers authentic French cuisine in a charming retro setting, with walls decorated with old metal advertising signs. A favorite of locals (about €20 per person for lunch).

Les Fauves , a cafe and restaurant at MuMa, serves versions of French classics and creative desserts in an upscale room with views of the water (about €20 to €30 per person for lunch).

Elaine Sciolino is a contributing writer and former Paris bureau chief for The New York Times, based in France since 2002. Her newest book, “Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love With the World’s Greatest Museum,” will be published in 2025. In 2010, she was decorated a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, the highest honor of the French state.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2024 .

Open Up Your World

Considering a trip, or just some armchair traveling here are some ideas..

52 Places:  Why do we travel? For food, culture, adventure, natural beauty? Our 2024 list has all those elements, and more .

Mumbai:  Spend 36 hours in this fast-changing Indian city  by exploring ancient caves, catching a concert in a former textile mill and feasting on mangoes.

Kyoto:  The Japanese city’s dry gardens offer spots for quiet contemplation  in an increasingly overtouristed destination.

Iceland:  The country markets itself as a destination to see the northern lights. But they can be elusive, as one writer recently found .

Texas:  Canoeing the Rio Grande near Big Bend National Park can be magical. But as the river dries, it’s getting harder to find where a boat will actually float .

I didn’t grow up travelling but now I’m visiting all the landmarks that inspired me

My hard-working immigrant parents believed travelling for fun was frivolous, and they encouraged me to focus on my studies. But it’s those studies that fuelled my fascination for ancient architecture – and I couldn’t imagine never seeing it for myself.

It was early morning in Cairo, Egypt , and still cold and dark. The ride was peaceful and comfortably quiet alongside our fellow travellers, most of us still dreary eyed and possibly even drooling. With each passing minute, the pyramids I had only seen in movies got closer and grew larger and sharper. They almost looked gold in the light of the rising sun.  

As I hopped out of our modern-day chariot, a faux-leather-lined travel van, my girlfriend Allison’s hand in mine, we were met with a warm glow. There they were. The Great Pyramids of Giza. Iconic, mammoth, radiating the sun back at us as it outlined every crevice, crack and brick. To simply say I was in awe doesn’t capture it.  

‘I’ve seen these on screen, I’ve read about them in books, drawn them in art class, but I’ve never truly seen them. Not like this,’ I thought to myself. There I was, experiencing one of the oldest wonders with the love of my life. How privileged, inspired and humbled I felt in that moment. 

Growing up, I was fascinated by architecture. Especially ancient world architecture. I’ve always thought that, while an individual cannot live forever, what we as humanity can build and construct is a way of affirming our existence and withstanding the test of time. The pyramids cemented that belief as I stood among people from all walks of life gathering to marvel at them. 

Maybe that’s why I studied civil engineering. So much of my education and interests revolved around what we can create from our minds with some math and some work. 

Despite graduating as an engineer, my heart wanted to follow a different path, a concept that’s still somewhat foreign to my South Asian Indian community. I decided to become an entrepreneur. Want to see shock? Look at the face of an Indian man whose son has just told him he’s going to run his own gym.  

Studying hard my whole life had led to a neglect in my physical wellbeing. During my undergrad, I took control of my health and got into fitness. While the physical transformation was encouraging, what I valued was the sense of independence and confidence that came from taking care of myself.  

I wanted to share this feeling with others. I didn’t want to work for someone and the same way I took ownership of my own wellbeing, I wanted to take ownership of my career.  

While my love for engineering faded, my awe of monuments like the Great Pyramids, the Colosseum, the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal lived on. But as the son of two immigrant parents, I grew up with the idea that travelling ‘just for fun’ is frivolous. 

What I understand now, and what my parents may never understand, is that money only has a value when you use it on the things that truly matter to you. 

My parents moved to Canada in their 20s, and taking trips back to India to visit family was the only travel I saw my parents do. Like many South Asian immigrants, they worked tirelessly to pave a path for my younger sister and I, but for two hard-working immigrants the idea of spending money on luxuries was always frowned upon.  

My parents grew up in the poor countryside of Gurjarat, so every dollar made was precious, cherished even. As first-gen immigrants, they made sure to impart that quality in us children. Every snack, concert, clothing, activity and field trip was scrutinised.  

To this day, I struggle with the concept of spending money on personal enjoyment. A certain level of coveting was instilled into me at a young age. What I understand now, and what my parents may never understand, is that money only has a value when you use it on the things that truly matter to you. 

The idea of spending my life without experiencing ancient architecture and all the world had to offer didn’t sit right with me. The presence of those famous monuments was a constant reminder that I just had to reach out to experience their history. This reality loomed over me, especially during the pandemic. 

I assured myself that I would travel eventually.  

Then, I met Allison, an experienced traveller, to say the very least. She had already travelled to more than 30 countries. The universe brought us together (well, maybe with the help of a certain dating app’s algorithm). Either way, it felt like kismet.

The first time I had left the country in over 20 years was with Allison. We visited Rome . I had dreamed of seeing the Colosseum since watching The Gladiator as a kid. Experiencing it firsthand versus reading about it or seeing it in a film was so different. Seeing famous sights like the Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon affirmed it. I was in love with travelling. The gelato shop visits every evening helped too.  

Like me, Allison is an entrepreneur. Just one of the many hats she wears. For all the great parts about it, being an entrepreneur isn’t easy. I work roughly 80 hours a week. There is a very real burnout concern. As someone that has never really travelled, who rarely has the bandwidth to plan a social hangout, let alone a trip, jetting off to some far-flung destination posed some real obstacles.  

The first time I had left the country in over 20 years was with Allison. We visited Rome. I had dreamed of seeing the Colosseum since watching The Gladiator as a kid.

Allison suggested taking a trip with Intrepid to Egypt and Jordan . A company that takes care of itineraries and uses local leaders is perfect for a pair of busy entrepreneurs who have zero time for planning. Being a person of colour and Allison being a person with a disability, brands like Intrepid who pride themselves on inclusion and representation speak to us. And knowing that they support local communities with homestay visits and experiences made us feel like we would get a more authentic version of Egypt and Jordan.   

Seeing the ancient Great Pyramids and Sphinx in real life with Intrepid was everything I could possibly ask for. It’s a core memory that will live on etched in my mind forever, but there were other moments that made me feel thankful. We took a hot air balloon over the King’s Valley as the sun rose. We sailed on the Nile as the stars brightened in the sky.  

I even got to walk the historical site of Petra – a city cut into pink-hued mountain rock. The monastery and treasury, with their towering columns and weathered yet enduring sculptures, are top draws for visitors. As an engineer, seeing these colossal stone structures was remarkable. What stood out to me most was the seemingly endless hours and effort required to carve such buildings and put fine intricate details into sandstone. It’s a level of artistry and devotion we don’t often see today. 

Now as I continue to travel and admire the work of history’s engineers, thanks to my parents, I can appreciate the engineers’ efforts even more.  

My parents supported my engineering studies. Without that, I wouldn’t have spent hours developing the skills to create buildings, bridges and roads. Understanding the math, physics and design process has given me a deeper understanding and appreciation for the construction of humankind’s greatest monuments and only strengthened my passion for ancient architecture.  

I may not be on the exact path my parents laid out, but in many ways, I carry them with me. What they didn’t realise was by creating so many opportunities for me, they provided the means for me to take my own path.  

Of course, travel isn’t just about the paths we’ve taken ourselves, but the many different paths that cross one another. The people we get to meet and the stories we share.   

My favourite moments, the parts of the trip that really stood out, were the dinners and hang-outs with my new travel mates. Here I was, a Canadian-born Indian man breaking bread with people from different walks of life, forming friendships and sharing stories. It didn’t feel frivolous.

It’s something you have to experience in person. Enjoying laughs while scarfing down shawarma in travel vans or sipping wine as the sun sets, these moments feel like integral pieces of your personal history. Like those awe-inspiring ancient monuments, it’s an opportunity to create something for yourself that spans a lifetime.  

Sahil travelled on Intrepid’s 15-day Discover Egypt & Jordan trip.

Feeling inspired?

Sahil Patel

Sahil is a personal trainer and gym owner from Montreal, Canada, born to to immigrants hailing from a small village in Gujarat, India. As a busy entrepreneur, Sahil uses travel as way to recharge and expand his horizons.

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Beau welling begins renovation of no. 1 public-access course in vermont, share this article.

Stowe Country Club, ranked by Golfweek’s Best as the No. 1 public-access course in Vermont , is slated to undergo a two-year renovation by golf architect Beau Welling.

In the town of Stowe, the course originally opened in 1950 and was expanded in 1962 by William Mitchell. The club plans a growing membership, but public-access opportunities are available through stay-and-play packages at the Lodge at Spruce Creek.

Beau Welling Design has drawn up a comprehensive renovation plan, with work on the front nine having started this month and to be completed this year, then work on the back nine to be completed in 2025. This allows golf to continue with at least nine holes open each year.

Stowe Country Club in Vermont before a Beau Welling-led renovation (Courtesy of Stowe Country Club)

Welling’s plan includes:

• Renovation of all the greens with an emphasis on creativity and fun.
• Shaping and regrading of select fairways.
• A total bunker renovation.
• All tees, fairways and greens will be re-grassed with bent grass. The roughs will be a mix of Kentucky bluegrass and fescue.
• While maintaining roughly the same footprint, length will be added to the currently 6,195-yard, par-72 layout.
• Expand the stretches of fescue throughout the property.
• Improve drainage and install a new irrigation system.
• The plan includes a new golf facilities areas, a new practice area, expanded amenities and a future residential community.

“As a design team, we are collaborators at heart, and we are excited to be working alongside Stowe Country Club to breathe new life into one of the best golf courses in the region,” Welling said in a media release announcing the renovation. “This project will make the golf course more approachable for the average player while retaining the precise challenge that members and guests have enjoyed for over 70 years.”

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