Travel Agency Site - need a hot design!

Dube Travel - a family business located in Maine, USA

We arrange travel for 3 segments of travelers. Vacationers, groups, and business travelers. We combine the service of a small company, with the convenience of doing things online.

The primary focus for the website is vacationers. For leisure travel, we have 3 target audiences.

1. Honeymooners - This is a very important market as it is our future customers. If we can capture them now, we have a better chance to keep them. They are online now, so we need to have a design and features that keep them.

2. Families - these people are busy so we want to be able to communicate with them when they need us and be able to help them plan easier.

3. seniors - many still have discretionary income. We need to have a site easy for them to navigate - this will not be the primary focus of the site.

In addition, we also work with Groups and would want a section for this. Lastly is the business travel market that highlights our services.

The primary focus for the site is the leisure traveler who is looking at options at night. We would like it to be somewhat casual to give a sense of "vacation" but not turn away a busienss traveler who looks at our site.

We'd like our new site to be very interactive. We would like to incorporate live chat and badges to social media (FB and Twitter). I would like to incorporate flash on the home page to have offers scrolling through.

1. Colors should be bright and lively and complement our logo's colors. We're in a cold climate, so many of our customers wish to vacation in warmer climates. We'd like the color scheme and theme to reflect that, to some degree.

2. We're looking for a clean, crisp layout - we do not want to come across as being too "corporat-ie". We're a family business, and we'd like our online image to be very approachable and friendly.

3. The headers should be clear, simple and bold. We want something that stands out.

4. While we're only asking you to design one home page, the look will become the wrapper for all the sub-pages, which will be standard content page layouts. We'd like this "wrapper" to be flexible, and include a horizontal main navigation menu and utility navigation menu in the upper right.

5. We will require a layered .psd file as the final product (RGB). Do not mind if you use stock images, but please make sure you declare it.

1

The horizontal main menu should have link tabs for the following: Business Travel, Vacations, Cruises, Honeymoons, Groups & Tours, "Flights, Hotels & Cars", Specials and Hot Deals. The utility menu in the upper right should include: Home, About Us, Events Calendar, Contact Us.

The home page should feature a rotation of large images that promote the various types of travel services we offer.

Panel images: One row should have 3 or 4 banner or panel images that feature selected services. Another row should have two larger banner or panel images that feature selected services. Our CMS allows these panels to be interchangeable, so we will create a bunch in a separate project. We're not holding you to the design of these panel images. Just a rough mockup will be fine. The layout is what we're looking for.

The home page should also accommodate featured blog posts, hot news items or announcements, e-mail newsletter sign up form and a featured hot special.

http://www.dubetravel.com

Very old, outdated design. Yuk.

http://www.libertytravel.com/
like the colors and layout

http://www.hewinstravel.com
Local company. Nice site.

http://www.hurleytravelexperts.com
love the large rotating images

http://www.travelleaders.com/travelleaders
Franchise we belong to and woudl like to incorporate some of the colors and themes of their site

http://www.thomascook.com
Like the layout and look.

http://www.sandals.com/
One of our top vendors. Always loved their web site design.