Travel Website

We have been working with The Luxury Travel Society for a long time, it wasn’t just for this web design project. We have also been providing their pay per click and social media campaigns for some time. We also designed their other website, The Maldives Travel Society.

This project came to be because The Luxury Travel Society wanted to increase the conversion rate of their Google pay-per-click adverts. Because we were managing them, we could see that the website was what was holding them back.

After a number of Zoom meetings, we decided that the right move was to update the design and layout of their website.

The website had over 300 hotels within an outdated and messy custom WordPress CMS that had previously been used. There were various “Twin Centre”, “Multi Centre”, and “Safari and Tour” pages all under the “Hotels” post type. This meant the design on the front end of these posts was messy and incorrect, as the previous designers hadn’t created dedicated page templates for these post types.

One of our first tasks was to fix this. We set up custom post types within WordPress for each and every travel option. This allowed us to create bespoke page templates that could be dynamically filled from within the CMS. For example, the Twin Centre and Multi Centre posts needed an itinerary section displayed, unlike the hotel posts.

We also sorted through the data. There were lots of incorrectly set up fields and data. Using specific tools, we migrated content from one field to another, ensuring everything was where it should be. This allowed for smoother and more seamless page designs.

Finally, we migrated all of the hotels, countries and locations from the old site over to the new site.

While we were sticking with the tried and tested WordPress CMS, we wanted to clean up the backend and make the website easier to manage for the team using it. Here are a few ways we made the CMS more user-friendly for people who aren’t website designers.

Using our licensed suite of WordPress plugins, we installed software that automatically compresses images as they’re uploaded to the site. This made the process much quicker and smoother for the team when adding images.

One element we carried over from the old website was the dynamic quote links. This meant that when someone clicked a link on a hotel page, it would automatically populate the “Quick Quote” form with the hotel name and location from the page they came from.

It was a great feature and we felt it helped improve conversion rates, as users had fewer fields to fill out and the sales team received more useful information about each lead. That said, the feature was let down by the fact that the team had to manually write out each link in a complicated way within the CMS. We fixed this by making the links automatically generate for each hotel page, so the feature works seamlessly without any extra effort.

Another big flaw with the old CMS was that the team had to write HTML for certain elements, such as bold text, lists, and formatting.

We resolved this by making the content automatically style itself on the front end. This made it much easier for someone without web experience to log into the CMS and make updates confidently.

The pay per click campaign was set up to send users directly to individual hotel pages. This meant the pages essentially acted as landing pages, which came with a few important considerations.

First, we needed to make the calls to action much clearer and more effective. We reviewed competitor pages and took inspiration from elements that were clearly performing well.

We also redesigned the gallery using a modern “Bento Box” layout to give the page a fresher, more engaging feel.

Lastly, we improved the fonts and heading styles across the template to help key content stand out more.

The new hotel page template led to a significant boost in conversion rates from the pay per click campaigns. Visitors are now spending more time on the site before submitting an enquiry or leaving.

Click here to view one of their hotel pages.

One of the biggest challenges The Luxury Travel Society faced was how to display 25 different countries in their site navigation.

We solved this by redesigning the navigation with a clean and functional mega menu, making it easy to include all countries while keeping the layout fully responsive on mobile.