10 Great Travel Website Examples and Their Model Themes
One of the major selling points of WordPress as a CMS, or content management system is that nearly anyone can make a website. That is true, but only to a point. Still, building a website from scratch is arduous technical work. Many WordPress users buy professionally built WordPress themes, to serve as templates to their websites.
This is where a lot of users hit their first snags: the themes are usually presented using graphics the rights to which do not pass on to the buyer of the theme, and even if they did, what good is a website if they are all the same? What‘s more, many themes aspire to be the Swiss army knife of functionalities and features. If they achieve that – great! If they don‘t? Not as great. But in either case, the user is left with a slew of options and settings they don‘t know how to set up or don‘t know how to make the best of. To see how a certain theme actually looks when used on a website, pick a WordPress site that you particularly like, and then find out what WordPress theme the site is using.
To help you understand what to look for in a theme, we made a selection of the themes and websites we liked. Here is a list of travel websites and the themes they are based on, with special attention given to the important features of each theme.
Made with BonVoyage
Right off the bat, we‘ll see how Mexico Sol Tours used BonVoyage‘s travel agency homepage for maximum effect. The visitor is immediately shown a holiday snap, getting the intended message: this could be you. Right beneath the picture is the filterable advanced search bar, so you can check what interests you right away. And, scrolling down, we see the grid of attractive and colourful thumbnails with basic details of services on offer. This is followed by a full-width bar with the special offer of the personalized service, a featured video which plays in a lightbox, with the contact form at the bottom. The header and footer are both very discreet, so as to put more emphasis on the graphics, but the social media icons are clearly visible.
Clicking on an item in the grid, you get the detailed view of the offer, with some clean copy, a summary of the basic info (departure and return times, dress code, and included features) in the middle, and a selection of photos at the end. Going through the tabs, you will find a detailed tour plan, a more extensive gallery, and a very easy to use booking widget. As you can see, an elegant, beautiful but not cluttered website, providing a travel agency customer with all they could possibly need.
Made with Roam
Secondly, we give you Ananastur. This website treats the visitor with a large graphic of a desired locale, overlaid with a discreet header menu, a slogan, and some animated interactive buttons: an anchor for the principal offers and a contact button for WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and the Russian social network Vkontakte. The rest of the front page is devoted to a summary of the tour operator‘s activities, a selection of services on offer, followed by an embedded video and some more enticing graphics. This presentation is rounded off by a testimonials section and a contact form. Contact info is also to be found in the discreet header and footer.
A single trip post puts the basic info (dates, duration, places available) and amenities (insurance, meals, guide) up front, with a detailed description of the service to follow. Immediately below are the button for the booking form (not immediately shown so as not to clutter the page), followed by an elegant masonry gallery so the site‘s visitors can get a taste of adventure on offer. A minimum of text for maximum effect.
Made with Getaway
Simsim Reisen lands you on some enticing, high-end photos peppered with snappy slogans, calling you to join the adventure. A slimple about section separates the top graphic from the beautiful masonry gallery of tours on offer. The discreet on-hover animation draws you in, but scrolling down you will reach a testimonials section, for some extra credibility, followed by a photo-blog and a customized map with the locations Simsim Reisen will take you to.
The footer is a grey block with bright orange and white details for the essentials: contact info, latest posts, mission statement, and social media icons, all peppered with images from the facebook feed and some more professional quality photos. All the tours are classed by type, and the single post items follow a similar pattern to the home page: a beautiful image with a simple table outlining the important info on times, dates, and prices.
Made with GoTravel
Izlet na vozicku specializes in tours for special needs persons, and the warm, pastoral imagery it greets the visitors with right away really captures the welcoming and gentle feel of the service. This is immediately followed by a functional search bar and a beautiful masonry hallery of tours. Below it, you‘ll find a presentational video about touring for people using wheelchairs and the mission statement of the company. The rest of the homepage is an anchor link to the search bar and the latest trips on offer. The footer is large, but contains a significant amount of info the visitors might need.
A trip page is compact and elegant, very graphics-forward, with four tabs: a short description, a detailed plan, a photo gallery, and comments. The entire website is very easy to navigate, and uses a stripped-down version of the GoTravel home page.
Made with SetSail
Travelons offers sustainable tours for environmentally-conscious people. The original theme‘s bright colours are subdued here, but not drab. Where a more intense palette might be seen as a call to adventure, Travelons offers instead a romantic, dreamlike template for the visitor‘s own ideas and impressions to build on. The initial lo-fi photo is supplemented by notes on the character of the tours on offer in an informative but unobtrusive way.
The lower part of the homepage is reserved for a masonry grid with a showcase of types of tours on offer, illustrated by some professional photography, but also more business-related details and a how-to button to break it up and make the gallery more legible. This is followed by a mission statement and an enticing slogan, with a short outline of the booking procedure. Rounding off the page is an accordeon-layout FAQ, special offer coupon links, an Instagram widget and some basic info (contact, accepted payment types, mailing list subscription) in the footer.
Made with Altair
Continuing the trend of large-format graphics front and centre is the cruise tour website CruiseShopping. After some enticing imagery, immediately below the fold is the search form, with filters for destinations, ships, duration, lines, and months, with more search options hidden behind buttons so as not to overwhelm the visitor. A visitor can use these advanced options to search for cruises by ship and port of departure, too. This is followed with a couple of full-width horizontal bars with some image links for featured tours, a brief summary of the general quality of service, and a plain and simple but nonetheless informative footer. The cruises themselves are rudimentary, but that does make them easily navigable.
Made with Adventure Tours
Paddle In Spain offers adventurous holidays and aims, unsurprisingly, to grab the visitor‘s attention with a large photo of an adrenaline-driven holiday adventure. Immediately thereafter you‘ll find a brief company mission statement and a message from the CEO, with a link for the team roster page, followed by a map with pins for each of the tours the operator offers. Below the map is a carousel of destinations, followed by a carousel of types of tours, so the visitor can intuitively pick a location using different criteria. At the bottom are a blog with some current information and a testimonial, a mailing list subscription form and a very well-put-together footer.
In contrast, single tour items are very plain and clean, with a more discreet image on top and all the relevant info in neat boxes and tabs. The visitor can easily find the details of each trip, a short summary of the necessary data, a map and a gallery, with a prominent booking widget on the side, just above a gift voucher link, for those among the visitors who wish to gift an experience.
Made with Backpack Traveler
Fragmentator uses one of Backpack Traveler‘s demos (judiciously modified, of course) to present a funky, modern blog for visitors looking to vicariously experience something special. Interestingly, the first thing a visitor sees isn‘t a massive, imposing photograph, but rather an array of really interesting thumbnails arranged in a carousel, like candies in a box. These featured posts are followed by a blog in some more detail and a mission statement, the featured posts repeated in a different display, for emphasis, with a very elegantly curated Instagram gallery at the end. This website is much more about the personal experience, and we find it a great example of a website made to work really well for what it was originally designed for.
Made with Backpack Traveler
Progettiamo is, coincidentally, completely unrelated to travel – it is a website dedicated to the sale of floors, fixtures, and fittings. Still, this being an area where visuals are especially important, the template works remarkably well, too: emphasis is placed on the first large-format graphic the visitor sees, showcasing the seller‘s wares to full effect. More space has been given to the header, whose menu details the types of wares on offer.
For each type of feature, the seller offers several remarkably well-selected photos as well as some context for each installation. The site is interspersed with full-width bars for special promotions, and each page ends with a contact form optimized for a preliminary quote for whatever you‘re in the market for. This graphics-forward template is an excellent example of a website made to work really well using a theme not originally designed for the task.
Made with Trawell
Finally, we have En El Camino, a professional but still cozy travel blog. An idyllic photo sets the tone, and is followed by an about me section (with a button for more detail on the blogger) and a very short mission statement. This is then followed by a featured destinations grid, with a pronounced on-hover zoom, drawing you in towards the images. Then we see the latest articles, an instagram carousel, adn a spacious and informative footer with special emphasis on social media icons and a code of ethics with regards to prodauct placement.
Each of the articles covers a topic in detail, in a very plain and familiar blog format, with a right hand side sidebar supplying the visitor to links for the shop, search and other important sections and a comments section on the bottom. All in all a very cozy and familiar blog design.
To Conclude
Here ends our little showcase of websites based on themes designed for traveling agencies and travel blogs. If you‘re looking for a utilitarian design in those respects, be sure to check out the features of the theme that looks good to you, specifically booking, gallery and possibly blog functionalities. A graphics-heavy home page is also a good bet. If you need more inspiration and guidance to get started, make sure to learn from the best and consider expert tips for writing a travel blog.
We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!
