Vacation with Drupal: Showcase of Travel and Tourism Websites

Drupal can help businesses across any industry create rich digital experiences. With benefits like scalability, responsive design out-of-the-box, flexible API-first architecture, and one of the largest open source communities, it’s no surprise that more than one million sites trust Drupal today.

One of our agency partners, Miles, specializes in creating forward-looking websites for destination and hospitality businesses. By creating rich digital experiences for its clients, Miles is inspiring travel and enabling customers’ business success.

Drupal and Acquia Cloud allow us to build and deliver amazing travel destination sites rapidly that can also handle the scale of visitors throughout the busy travel season. - Andrea Wood, Vice President of Marketing at Miles.

If you’re already using Drupal or planning to use Drupal as a CMS to power your travel or tourism site, here are just a few examples of how other businesses in this space are using Drupal, inspired by Miles’ customers.

You may even come across a couple of places you’d like to visit as well.

TravelWyoming.com: Module-Based Approach and Industry Extranet

TravelWyoming.com embodies the natural beauty and untamed spirit of the West, pairing grand visuals with thoughtful content that taps into the mindset of those seeking their next great adventure. Easy-to-access planning information pulls site visitors down the travel funnel from high-level inspiration to actual booking, and because the site is responsive, it can move with visitors anywhere, on any device.

Working closely with the Wyoming Office of Tourism, the Drupal developers at Miles focused on allowing content to drive the page layouts for TravelWyoming.com — instead of the template-driven approach taken on by many other sites.

The flexibility to create campaign and content pages was key because the site’s focus is to showcase the new “That’s WY” brand while driving partner referrals. Through a module-based approach, the responsive website includes the flexibility to create whatever page layout best tells the story for any given piece of content.

Additionally, Miles developed an Industry Extranet solution that gives Wyoming Office of Tourism’s industry partners a robust, easy-to-use platform for updating listing information on the site, as well as the ability to submit other rich content assets such as photos, videos and article ideas. Partner updates are connected to Drupal through an API for a seamless share of data.

GoToBermuda.com: Taxonomy Powered and Node Referenced Content Delivery

The new, visually rich GoToBermuda.com is a fully responsive website designed to reflect the destination’s new brand, convey Bermuda’s story on any device, connect visitors to on-island tourism partners and enable Bermuda Tourism Authority (BTA) staff to easily administer the site.

Tapping into the allure and intrigue of the new brand, a robust collection of rich, brand-aligned feature content — articles, listicles, itineraries and videos — connects users to local insights and island experiences. The sophisticated, visually stunning site was designed with a mobile-first approach and makes use of eye-catching elements like cinemagraphs.

The developers at Miles leveraged Drupal’s taxonomies and node reference capabilities to make content recommendations that encourage deeper content exploration on the site.

Taxonomies are used to make related content recommendations on interest-based landing pages, regional-landing pages and editorial pages. Node references are used on editorial pages to power Google maps showing related tourism businesses, and a reverse lookup of those same node references on tourism business pages show where those businesses have been mentioned on editorial pages around the site. GoToBermuda.com is freely and easily managed by BTA’s tourism staff.

ThePalmBeaches.com: Component-Driven Design with Drupal

Palm Beach County, Florida, is a diverse destination providing visitors with a wealth of experiences, many of them unexpected. ThePalmBeaches.com promotes engaging experiences and trip ideas in bold new ways.

Through close collaboration with Discover The Palm Beaches, Miles took a component-driven approach to developing ThePalmBeaches.com on the Drupal CMS.

This allows Discover The Palm Beaches staff the flexibility to easily manage content and seasonal promotions. For example, inspirational landing pages were developed for showcasing the diversity and beauty of the location, while allowing for video assets to be in the forefront. (Palm Beach County is a large region that encompasses a variety of destinations, and this is especially useful for telling each city’s unique story.)

The site’s responsive format is core to capitalizing on organic traffic and focusing media campaign traffic, which is now more often viewed on mobile devices than desktop.

VisitStPeteClearwater.com: 360 Video Portal

On VistiStPeteClearwater.com, you’ll find a Visit St. Pete/Clearwater 360° Video Portal that brings together the destination’s library of virtual reality videos, created to inspire travelers at the “dreaming” stage of vacation planning.

This dedicated section is designed to enable users to move fluidly from video to video, encouraging them to immerse themselves in 360° video content in one seamless experience — ultimately giving them a preview of things to see and do in the area. Like the website, the portal is fully responsive so potential visitors can watch the videos and navigate through the section on any device and any browser — a first for a destination marketing organization (DMO) in the United States.

The videos also connect viewers to planning content — dedicated articles about the experience that answer questions users may be looking to answer after watching the video like the best time to visit to have the experience, and what attractions or things to do that are nearby.

Michigan.org: Roadtrippers Integration

When it came to powering business listings on the new Michigan.org, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) had an extensive point-of-interest database for tourism-related locations in the state, but lacked a tactical planning tool that could help users move beyond the inspiration phase of traveling. To that end, the MEDC and Miles partnered with Roadtrippers to leverage their excellent product — more than 12 million points of interest across thousands of categories — which fulfilled that exact need.

The solution was a shopping-cart-type widget that can add locations from Michigan’s POI database and map that to Roadtrippers’ POI database. This allows users to search and find the places they want to visit in Michigan, and then send that information to Roadtrippers, where users can then execute more functional, travel-related features such as calculating total trip distance, manipulating the itinerary, calculating gas cost, etc.

Hopefully these examples will give you some fresh ideas when building your own travel and tourism digital experience on Drupal (or even planning your future vacation destination).

For more examples of innovative travel and tourism websites, check out our friends at MilesPartnership.com.