Planning to build a travel website and wondering what CMS (content management system) to use? You might want to consider Drupal as your preferred travel website building framework. It is considered to be one of the best CMS for a tourism website.

Unlike a normal business website, a travel website comes with multiple features specifically facilitating interaction not just between your customers and your website, but also between your customers themselves.

A Travel Website is usually a complete portal. It has hundreds of tourist and travel destination listings. Visitors and travellers can leave reviews of different destinations and also leave ratings.

A travel blog can be incorporated within the website and it can be managed by multiple authors and even by travellers themselves. You may have multiple photo albums and interactive slideshows. Basically, a travel website these days is a complete ecosystem in itself.

Long gone are the days when businesses would have websites constituting of just HTML pages. Even moderately-sized websites these days prefer to use a CMS.

You must be very careful when choosing a CMS for your travel website. You need to keep in mind that once you have built a website, for a long time, you will be stuck with your CMS unless you’re ready to spend more money, time and effort on a completely different CMS.

A CMS used to build a website doesn’t just give you a robust structure over which you can build your entire website, it also has all the essential components to facilitate long-term maintenance of the website. Every major CMS also accommodates themes or design templates that you can customise easily, according to your branding needs.

One of the oldest and the most popular open source CMSs is Drupal. It is believed to be one of the best CMS for a travel agency website.

Drupal – an Ideal CMS for your Travel Website

In fact, not just your upcoming travel website, even if you already have a travel website up and running and you are considering moving to a different CMS, you wouldn’t like to miss having a look at the various Drupal features.

Due to its flexibility and malleability, Drupal is a preferred choice for government agencies, business associations, non-profit websites and Fortune 500 companies. It can be as simple as you want and as powerful as you want. You can create highly user-friendly and accessible websites with Drupal.

Some of the biggest websites being run by Drupal include eBay, The Economist, Tesla Motors, Tesla Motors, Grammy and Pfizer. Some of the travel websites built with Drupal include Fiji Travel, Princess Cruises and Seychelles.

Here are 8 reasons why you should definitely use Drupal as your CMS for your travel website.



Mobile responsive out-of-the-box One of the biggest concerns these days is can people access your website from their mobile phones? According to Statista, by October 2019, almost 50% of your traffic is coming from mobile devices, 48.91%, to be precise. This is a big chunk of traffic you don’t want to ignore. Not just access your website for general information, people should be able to fully use your website to go through various travel destinations, to read reviews, to access coupons and offers, and also to make bookings. Everything people can do on your browser-based website on PCs and laptops, should also be able to do from their mobile phones. Drupal is mobile-ready out-of-the-box. The framework simply works. It scales all the functions present within the CMS according to the size of the screen. You don’t have to worry about creating different layouts unless there is something really specific you want to achieve that is not present in the Drupal CMS. Dedicated Booking Engine A travel website without a booking engine is frankly, like a vehicle without an engine. People should be able to search for different travel destinations on your website and if they want, they should also be able to make bookings and make payments on the fly. The strength of every CMS is gauged by its ability to facilitate add-ons, plug-ins and modules and this is what enables Drupal to incorporate cutting-edge travel booking engine just the way you want it. For Drupal, you have 2 options:

EasyBooking This is an extension. Once you have installed it within Drupal your visitors can make room reservations, contact hotel administration directly and avail special offers and discounts from within your interface. This extension is further powered by other two Drupal extensions namely Drupal Rooms and Drupal Commerce. It’s main features include: Checking for online availability of rooms.

Online booking with instant payments.

Admin-controlled availability calendar.

Liquid layout and responsive design.

Easily works with Internet Explorer 8.

You can easily integrate it with all major payment gateways and processors. BAT BAT is one of the most widely used booking and availability management tools for Drupal, especially on travel websites. Since its UI is minimal its power can only be leveraged by experienced Drupal developers. If you need to incorporate commerce and payment functionality or if you want to allow travellers to book resources on their own, a significant amount of coding will be required. BAT for Drupal works with a standalone PHP library developed by Roomify, the original developers of BAT. You can also build a standalone direct online booking system using this Drupal module. These modules allow you to run your business 24 x 7 by enabling your visitors to book travel destinations from your travel website round-the-clock. Even if you’re not necessarily an online travel agency, you can benefit from your online traffic by allowing people to make bookings using your website instead of spending time calling you and going through the nitty-gritty.