We get a lot of enquiries that start with some version of: “We need a new website. How much will it cost?”
I can usually tell you fairly quickly whether I think your website needs work. I can't tell you what that work should cost until I’ve looked properly at what you’ve already got.
That’s how every travel website design project starts with us. Before I put a figure on anything, I want to see what’s already built, what’s already ranking and what actually happens when someone lands on the site and tries to do something.
Skipping that step is how projects end up scoped around the wrong problem.
Why we audit before we quote, not after
It’s quite easy to quote for the website someone describes on a call.
The problem is that the description doesn’t always match the website we’re eventually going to work with. There might be useful content that needs migrating, rankings to protect, a CMS that’s causing problems behind the scenes or an integration nobody thought to mention.
We’ve found it’s better to find those things first. An audit before the quote means the number we give reflects the actual site in front of us and what we think needs to happen to it.
I start with what a traveller actually does
The first thing I want to understand is how someone uses the website.
If I’ve landed on your site because I’m thinking about a safari, trek or expedition, can I quickly work out what you offer? Can I understand why I’d travel with you rather than another company? Can I find the information I need to decide whether one of your trips is right for me?
Then I’ll start following the routes a real traveller might take. I might land on a destination page from Google, move to an itinerary, look at accommodation, try to work out roughly what the trip costs and then decide I want to speak to someone. I’m looking for where that journey becomes confusing, difficult or simply stops.
Travel websites need to be particularly good at this because people rarely arrive ready to book. They might visit several times over a period of weeks before they make an enquiry. If there’s a quiet leak somewhere in that journey, that’s more important to me than whether I like the homepage.
How the content is structured
Trips, destinations, experiences, accommodation and articles rarely exist on their own. They connect to each other, sometimes in quite complicated ways.
I wrote about this in more detail in Is Webflow still the right platform for your travel website?, but the short version is that the shape of your content, not the size of your business, tells us a lot about the website you need.
An audit is where we work that shape out. How many destinations do you have? How many trips? Does a camp appear across several itineraries? Are experiences separate from destinations? How easy is it for someone on your team to add or change those relationships? The answers affect the architecture, CMS and ultimately the platform we recommend.
They can affect the design too. When we redesigned Africa Born’s website, for example, the old site was organised primarily around destinations. We rebuilt it around Safari by Land, Safari by Air and Safari by Water because the experiences were what differentiated the company.
Part of this stage is also working out what’s already valuable. Some pages may already rank well, bring in enquiries or answer a question customers regularly ask. We want to protect those, not lose them in a redesign. We’re also looking for the opposite: pages nobody visits, duplicated information and gaps where travellers are looking for an answer the website doesn't provide.
That’s why I want to understand the content, what’s working and what isn’t, before we start drawing pages.
Can I tell why I should travel with you?
I also want to know whether the website gives me a reason to choose the company behind it. There are plenty of businesses selling safaris in Tanzania or luxury holidays in South Africa. If I removed the logo from the website, would the content still obviously belong to you?
I’m looking for the things only your business can really provide: first-hand experiences, advice from people who know the destination, useful detail about how you plan trips and evidence of the people and expertise behind the company.
This is important to travellers, and it’s becoming increasingly relevant to search and AI discovery too.
AI can produce a perfectly reasonable guide to the best time to visit Botswana in seconds. What’s harder to replicate is the person on your team explaining why they’d choose one camp over another for a particular family in October.
If that expertise exists inside the business but doesn’t exist on the website, that’s something we’ll pick up in the audit, alongside the more technical checks: which pages currently rank, whether the important commercial pages are indexed, and whether the structure makes the relationship between destinations, trips and experiences clear enough for Google and AI tools to work with.
Technical performance and mobile
Travel websites carry a lot of photography and video, and that weight can show up in load times. We check how the existing site performs because it helps us understand whether the problem is the images, the way the site has been built, the platform underneath it or a combination of all three.
I also use the mobile site rather than just checking whether it’s technically responsive. I’ll open the menu, browse trips, look through an itinerary, use filters if there are any and try the enquiry process.
A mobile site passing a responsiveness check doesn’t necessarily mean it’s pleasant to use. Large photographs that work well on desktop can become painfully slow on mobile. Long itinerary pages can turn into endless scrolling. A navigation system designed around a large screen can become surprisingly difficult once it's squeezed into a menu.
Who runs the site, and what it needs to talk to
This gets overlooked surprisingly often.
I want to know who’s going to add a new trip, change a price, publish an article or update a destination once we’ve handed the website back. If every routine change requires a developer, the website can quickly become a bottleneck for the marketing team.
We’ve seen the opposite with sites such as Ker & Downey Safaris, where the team can manage its own content through the CMS. That was a deliberate part of the website design, not something we thought about once the site was finished.
The same goes for what the site connects to. Booking engines, CRMs and other systems have a habit of appearing late in conversations about website design, and they can completely change the technical requirements. What happens when someone submits an enquiry? Where does that information go? Is there live availability or pricing?
It’s much easier to design around those requirements from the beginning than discover them halfway through a build.
What this means for your quote
By this point, we usually have a much clearer idea of what the project actually is.
Sometimes the audit confirms what the client already suspected: the website has reached the end of its useful life and rebuilding it makes sense. Sometimes the platform is fine but the structure isn’t. The content might need more work than the design. The booking or enquiry journey might be the real problem. Or much of the existing website might be worth keeping.
That’s also why the number of pages tells me very little about how complicated a project will be. A large site with a sensible structure can be easier to work with than a much smaller one with complicated products, poor content and several integrations. I don’t think it’s useful to quote for a website based on a page count and a few screenshots.
The number we give reflects what we’ve actually found, and we should be able to explain why we’re recommending each part of it. An audit can tell us that a website doesn’t need as much work as its owner thought. I’d rather say that than talk someone into a rebuild they don’t need.
If you’re planning a new travel website design, or you’re not sure whether the one you have is holding you back, talk to us. We’ll look at what’s there first and tell you what we’d change, what we’d keep and what we think the project actually needs.
FAQs
What is included in a travel website audit?
It depends on the project, but we typically look at customer journeys, site architecture, content, mobile experience, SEO and AEO, technical performance, CMS requirements and integrations. We also look at how your own team manages the site, because the website needs to work for them after launch as well as for travellers.
How long does a travel website design audit take before I get a quote?
It depends on how in-depth the audit needs to be, but a typical audit takes a couple of days. In most cases, you can expect to receive our quote within a week.
Will an audit tell me I don’t need a new website?
Sometimes, yes. If the foundations are solid, we’ll say so. The project might be better focused on content, customer journeys, design or a particular part of the website rather than rebuilding everything.
Do I need a new travel website or can my existing site be improved?
Not every website needs rebuilding. If the underlying platform and structure are sound, improving the design, content or customer journey may be enough. An audit helps establish which parts are worth keeping and which are holding the website back.
How often should a travel website be redesigned?
I wouldn't redesign a website simply because it has reached a particular age. The better question is whether it still supports the way your customers research and buy travel, whether your team can manage it easily and whether the technology is still doing what you need it to do.
