The travel and tourism industry has been through quite a lot these past few years. COVID-19 all but killed the industry, but if this past summer has taught us anything, it’s that as things opened back up and restrictions loosened, people were ready to get on planes, hit the road, and take their long-awaited trips. 

It’s time to get back to promoting your travel and tourism site, which means you have to ensure your site is set up right. You want to make sure that prospective travelers can navigate your site efficiently to get exactly what they need. 

The happier visitors are with your travel website, the higher the possibility of increased conversions and sales for you. In this article, we’ll discuss essential website features that will help prospects and website visitors get the best experience on your travel site.

Make your travel website engaging with the following must-have features:

Responsive Mobile-Friendly Design

The increasing use of mobile devices for long hours makes it a must for website owners to make their websites mobile-friendly. With people spending about five hours on their smartphones daily and 70% of web traffic coming from mobile phones, you will be missing a significant market share if you have a non-mobile-friendly travel website.

Take it a step further by ensuring it’s not only mobile-friendly, but responsive too. This means that irrespective of the mobile device people view your website from, it adjusts to fit the screen size of the specific device.

Optimize website pages for the mobile experience to create smooth navigation and a great user experience.

Payment Integration 

Overcome buying objections, close deals faster, and get more bookings by integrating multiple payment options on your travel website. By providing as many options as possible for your prospects, you’ll let them choose one that’s most convenient for them.

While credit cards still top the list as the most commonly used payment method, 36% of global online shoppers use eWallets, and 12% use debit cards. Providing multiple options means prospects can always choose their preferred method, making it more likely that they will become your customers.

Lead Capturing and Email Marketing

Email marketing is the best ROI-generating marketing channel, so harnessing it for your travel business is a must. It’s worth the effort, as the average email marketing return is $38 for every $1 spent. However, to see that return, you need to first capture leads on your website so you can grow your email list and enroll prospects in your email marketing campaigns. 

To capture the email addresses of website visitors, you have to create website forms. Placing these forms on lead magnets, landing pages, or creating pop-up forms on pages with high traffic presents opportunities for visitors to opt-in to your email marketing. You can also use gated content to encourage web visitors to share their contact details.

Once you have a sizable list, create demand and capture the interest of your subscribers by sending them relevant content. With the world finally opening up again, take advantage of people’s eagerness to travel and explore the world once more.

Using marketing automation, you can automate workflows to deliver relevant and timed content around check-ins, protocols, and what to expect, and send important messages at a moment’s notice. Automation does the heavy lifting of communicating with your prospects and customers, and you can use the extra time to focus on other parts of your travel business that need attention.

Predictive Search and Filter

Travel needs vary from person to person. A search filter provides your website’s visitors with a way to quickly get to packages, services, and destinations that align with their preferences and needs.

On the other hand, predictive search saves users time by suggesting results to customers as they type common queries into the search box. Sometimes, you may nudge your prospects to packages they never thought about, helping them get results quicker, and cutting the time it takes to wade through multiple results on an extensive list.

Blog Section

Aside from sending relevant content via emails to your prospects, an excellent way to build trust in your travel service is to educate them using high-quality content on the blog section of your website. 

Increase trust and overcome buyer objections by including customer-generated content. You could ask past customers to share their experiences with some of your travel locations and packages and use this to create blog posts that educate new customers and work as a testimonial at the same time.

Customer Testimonials

About 92% of customers make informed buying decisions after reading reviews, while 72% say they have increased trust in businesses after reading positive reviews. With this in mind, you should dedicate a section on your travel website for testimonials.

Testimonials from past customers will reassure potential customers about your travel packages, leading to more bookings and conversions.

Straightforward Checkout

Improvements to your travel website’s checkout flow can boost conversions by more than one-third. Mirror your customers’ expectations and make the checkout process on your travel website straightforward.

Remember to minimize the checkout flow elements on your travel website and avoid too many complications. Follow-up successful bookings with order-confirmation emails. You can also automate this step using Benchmark Email.

Not only do you give your customers straightforward checkout, but with order confirmation follow-ups, they have all the vital information about their package in one place.

Engaging Website Content

Content is king, and your travel website is no exception. You can have the best features on your website, but if your content is not engaging enough, you’re leaving money on the table.

Invest in a good content writer to create website content that will capture the attention of website visitors. Pay close attention to your package and destination descriptions. You’re most likely offering similar services to other travel service providers, but your copy is what will set you apart from your competitors.

What next? Take note of these essential features and implement them on your travel website for increased conversions, reduced bounce rates, increased bookings, and, ultimately, higher revenue. Don’t forget to use Benchmark Email to handle all your email marketing needs. Sign up for a free plan today!