How to easily create a mobile friendly website for a travel agency
As web technologies evolved dramatically in the last years, it became easier for anybody to create a website and more importantly, start a new business with minimal costs. You don’t need to have strong technical skills anymore, as you can create a website even online, in just a few steps.
Let’s say traveling is one of your biggest passions – as it is for most of us – and you want to materialize this passion into something else: you want to start your own travel agency, adventure travel company, tour operator, you got the point! And you want your main business to happen online, although offline interaction is always welcomed, especially with the older customers, who may prefer the traditional ways of buying traveling services.
Well, let’s say you’ve got all the needed details in place and you just need to figure out one of the most important things: how are you gonna build your website? The old way: hire a web-designer or the new way, which has basically changed how businesses are started: do it by yourself.
Well, because traveling means discovering new places and innovation is closely related to the adventurous spirit, we’d like to introduce you to the new way of building a website for your adventure travel agency: by yourself, easily, in a few steps. And no, you don’t need any technical skills, everything is WYSIWYG – what you see is what you get.
Here are a few online platforms which help you create a website for your agency with ease, and generally with just a few clicks:
- uKit
Founded in March 2014, uKit is a do-it-yourself website builder for businesses created by the team behind uCoz, a leading free website builder in Eastern Europe launched in 2005, which hosts over 1.5 million websites.
uKit is a fully drag’n’drop platform, where you can create a travel agency’s website just by moving elements around. It has a a good amount of Travel related templates that you can use to create your agency’s website.
In order to begin the work, you have to go to uKit’s website builder main site, register and start the easy development of your project. Because the end result will be seamessly displayed on any device, you’ll be able to welcome potential customers who are visiting via smartphones, notebooks or tablets.
It has many features needed for a business, including the possibility to connect a domain, mail your customers easily with Mail Chimp or embed a map to be visited with ease, in case you have a physical location. If you need inspiration for writing your website’s content, it’s a nice surprise to know that all of the templates come populated with useful and good quality texts. The number of travel related designs is expected to grow, but for now there are a few good choices.
They offer a Free Trial for 14 days followed by a single subscription monthly fee which starts with 4$/month when purchased for a year.
2. Wix
Wix is a good option for creating a tour agency website, especially due to its reputation coming from its high engagement: over 50 million registered users.
The system has been around since 2006 and is one of the oldest website builders on the market offering interesting options for travel related businesses.
For example, Wix developed a hotel reservation system which allows your guests (in case you manage a hotel/guesthouse/hostel) to book the rooms directly through your website.
In total, the website builder offers over 15 travel related templates from which you can choose from. Their monthly subscription starts at 4.08$/month, in case you pay for a whole year, but this has a few limitations, like ads displayed on the website.
In this case, the most viable option is the following package which starts at 6.21$/month and seems more business oriented. You can also highly benefit from their App Market so you can add useful widgets to your travel website like: Invoice and Accounting software, Bookings, Contact Forms, Events Calendar and others.
Although their templates are nice, a bigger variety for traveling lovers would be highly welcomed.
3. Jimdo
Hamburg based Jimdo has a big grip on small businesses and their website building services have been live since 2007. Their system has a more e-commerce approach, hence the number of travel related templates is slightly lower than the one from other web-hosting platforms, but it’s still fair enough. The way how their system is designed will mostly benefit travel agencies which are selling tours & packages online, as visitors will be able to easily book and buy it from your website with ease.
Given this, Jimdo has a completely free version which includes even the e-commerce option, although generally is quite limited, while their subscriptions start at 7.50$/month making it the most expensive among the 3 website builders presented.
Their templates are quite nice, although the classic way of populating them with Lorem ipsum type content is not helping any business owner who needs inspiration to describe his business and services offered.
What other tools do you use for creating and managing a Travel Agency website? We’d love to hear it from you in your comments. Thank you!
