Building the Perfect Travel Site Starts with Your CMS
Creating a travel website is easy. Creating a great one, however, is not. But with the right CMS, you can create rich, innovative digital experiences that make planning vacations much easier—and more fun, writes, Alexander Shumarski, Product Marketing Manager, Progress.
When you consider vacations are supposed to be fun, relaxing and enjoyable, actually planning a vacation is very much not so. These days, it’s easy to pour hours into researching destinations, comparing prices and booking accommodations across dozens of different sites. And even when you’re done, you’re often left with the lingering feeling that you forgot to do something critical.
Today, creating a website is easy. But creating a truly great digital experience is still something a lot of businesses struggle with—and this is particularly evident in the travel sector. Given all the money spent on travel, this seems like a great opportunity to explore where some of these sites are missing the boat and how they could deliver a better travel site that makes vacation planning a lot easier.
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A Designer-Friendly Approach
Much like the bartender at the resort’s exotic tiki bar, web designers are the ones who always have a knack for surprising you—even if they are just following the same old recipe. They take what you say you want and bring it to life in ways you didn’t even imagine. Fonts, color palettes and imagery—these are their key ingredients.
However, one major web design challenge is the number of design revisions, which grows alongside the complexity of the project and the number of stakeholders. This can create bottlenecks and slows down development. You can address this issue by picking a CMS that supports an agile web design process—including scaffolding, prototyping and even designing the pages straight into the CMS.
Table d’hôte or À la carte?
When building a website, you need to be innovative and imaginative, but most importantly, you need to truly understand your customers’ needs and desires. If trips to Mars will be available in 2030, then you need to start offering them now.
Whether you are building a single website or a mobile application, you should have the flexibility to deliver product-specific information across channels, geographies and audiences. Your CMS can help with that by providing tools like module builders that enable you to quickly create custom content, regardless of what you need or when you need it. This enables you to cover multiple use cases in the most sustainable way to achieve operational efficiency and growth.
Aisle or Window Seat? You Shouldn’t Need to Ask
The better a digital experience, the more jarring missteps can be. Imagine having a beautiful travel site that seems to hit all the marks, but then offering “exotic escapes” to the very city the visitor lives in.
Personalization enables you to tailor the experience to the specific preferences of your visitors based various actions, from time spent on a page to previous purchases. This is particularly powerful in the travel space—entire pages can be overhauled to appeal to the preferences of each visitor, serving up the vacation packages they’ve dreamed of.
Connect the Bytes to Connect the Flights
Extensibility and connectivity are two of the key CMS capabilities that can play a pivotal role in building a better travel site.
Think of it this way—imagine manually keeping track of thousands of different airfares and hotel rates. It’s impossible! However, if your CMS came with built-in connectors that gave you the ability to seamlessly access third-party data sources and systems, this task gets considerably easier.
By integrating data from hotel booking engines, airfare providers, vacation rentals or other global distribution systems, you get to provide value to your visitors and prospects and become a one-stop shop for all their travel and holiday making needs.
Travel in Good Company
The importance of data and system connectivity can’t be understated. Connecting to outside data sources to pull pricing information or room availability is just the first step. Interconnecting your social sharing automation software, PPC campaign manager, CMS, marketing automation and analytics can help you further enhance the experience. And, by adding your CRM, travel reservation and support systems into one complete digital experience platform, your organization can deliver the ultimate digital experience to your customers and provide a high level of visibility across the organization. Again, a CMS with built-in connectors can play a pivotal role in enabling this connectivity.
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Don’t Forget Your CMS
In a way, building the perfect travel site is not all that different from packing for a vacation. Your first instinct is to pack everything you could possibly want, but you also don’t want to overpack—then you’ll be stuck lugging around a heavy suitcase and paying extra fees! Sticking with analogy, picking the right CMS is like picking the right suitcase. You don’t want to overpay for infrastructure and services you don’t need, but you also don’t want to limit your options with a CMS that can’t scale to meet your needs. The right CMS makes your job much easier and can also help you deliver more value to customers, so picking the right CMS should be a top priority.
