Let us do the work for you and design a bespoke travel site on the Atlas Republic Travel Marketing Platform.
Is This You?
You’re a marketer or founder of a tour company or travel agency with a hip or upscale brand that sells bespoke itineraries as your core product. You may have pre-packaged tours but you don’t necessarily have them for sale online. You want the website visitor to initiate a relationship - not just lay down a credit card online. That’s how you sell and earn clients.
5 Simple Ways We Help
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Why You Shouldn't Work With Us
The Words "Control Freak" Are Frequently Used To Describe You.
Don't get us wrong, we love control freaks but prefer to hire them on our team v.s have them as clients. We have opinionated, battle-tested methods that have been refined over years. We’re open to suggestions and input but we require your trust to succeed.
You don’t sell travel in some capacity.
Our tools rock, we get it. However, it would be overkill for any other industry.
You don’t believe in subscription-based services.
Our hosting plans are affordable but are subscription-based investments. This helps us stay in business and continue to high-quality, well thought out travel marketing tools that will help you be more relevant to today’s travelers.
You need to be on your own server.
We host every site we build so we can take advantage of our custom streamlined codebase, servers, and tools.
Frequently Asked Questions
Getting Started
Would you hire a plumber to plan your wedding? Although, that could be fun, neither would we.
In short, we specialize. Here's a little on how we're different.
- Our background is in digital travel marketing. The problem with most design agencies is that they don't understand the nuance of selling travel and might build a beautiful site, but don't set you up for real success. We aim to do both by using the travel buying lifecycle to target your ideal traveler and deliver a site that is easy to use and well designed.
- The tools you get access to are developed and used in real travel sites every day. From the itinerary management system to the destination and marketing tools, to the analytics. Everything has been thought through and tightly integrated.
- You'll learn from our combined knowledge. We've only build travel sites and have been at it for a long time. You'll leverage our combined experience to help you avoid design and marketing pitfalls and craft a site that is memorable and highly useable.
Do you have clients that are a better fit for you than others? So do we. In order to make sure we're providing the most value possible, we only design for travel suppliers and agencies that have what it takes to absorb what we have to offer and run with it. This cuts down on miscommunication and makes sure the reality we deliver meets and ideally exceeds your expectations.
When you're accepted as a client we ask for 3 sources of inspiration and send you a brand personality and marketing objective quiz. Based on this, we submit some initial ideas. Once you give us feedback and we make some changes, we start the implementation and move everything to a live site where you can see the changes take place in a live environment.
Yes. We've found that with the hundreds of CMS's and their plugin options, having a semi-closed system with limited choices really helps you keep focused on what's really important; getting leads. That said, if there's a feature you need or want to see, we're really fast at implementing new things. It's extremely rare we can't implement an in-demand feature.
Yes! We never hold your content hostage. Think of us as your personal technical and marketing team. We'll do all the design, technical implementation, and analytics set up/training but the site is yours. At any time, you can cancel your account and put in a request for a full export of your data. We’ll give the files to your developer to host on their own. However, certain things like the page builder, layout templates, and lead tracking will no longer be available.
No. There are no long-term contracts. You can pay by the month or Year. Should you wish to opt-out, let us know and we will migrate your site over to your own host.
Yes. We can import pages, users, and blog posts. However, any custom itineraries or destinations may take extra work since we use our own tools. You will want to contact us to discuss how we can import those in a fast and easy way.
Yes, and then some. We have a huge list of email integrations and it's growing.
Design Process
Either. If we design for you, you'll work directly with our talented design team to come up with something fresh and original but that will be designed with the travel buying lifecycle and conversions in mind. If you have your own design, we can implement it for you.
Here's what you'll get:
Custom Global Theme
The theme is the overall global styling of your site. Think about a theme like a short little dictator with a god-complex. He sets the rules for things like fonts, colors, button styling, body text styling, headers, menus, and footers and enforces these rules across every page on your site. Here are some of the features of a theme you can expect.
- Responsive across all device types (mobile, tablet, desktop)
- Ability to edit and change all styling of the theme
- Ability to add and remove navigation at any time
- SEO friendly with the ability to edit & display title, meta, schema.org, Open Graph Protocol, and Google structured data markup.
- Custom Designed Style card (typography, colors, button styles etc.) See an example style card here.
Custom Built Layout Templates
These will be pages that we'll design and build but will use your content. Other than the home page, these are the pages that display the real content like staff profiles, destinations, itineraries etc. If the theme is the dictator, these page layouts are the soldiers. They follow the rules the dictator lays out, in terms of styling, but have their own goals in displaying your content.
- Homepage layout template ( The main landing page for your site)
- About us page layout template (a page to tell your brand story)
- Contact us page layout template (used for contacting you)
- Destination layout template (Seattle, Portland ect)
- Custom travel itinerary layout template ( used for custom itineraries on your site)
- Blog layout template (used for blog pages on the site)
Custom Designed Page Builder Block Templates
If a page layout is a soldier, the elements are the bullets the soldier uses to win the battle. These are custom-designed, drag and drop page-builder modules that you can reuse across all elements of your site. See some example custom block templates here.
- Helps you build a custom page quickly without needing to rehire a designer
- Inherits all the styling from your theme so they always look great
- Built using best practices from years of travel marketing experience
- Built using the latest user interface design principles for maximum interactivity
As unique as you are. Each of our clients has unique brands and we make sure that's demonstrated through visuals. While we do use modern coding practices that do fit a particular pattern, we strive to make sure that we're always addressing needs in new ways. Plus, you'll get access to hundreds of options to change the look and feel of your site without ever needing to code.
We do all we can to ensure the process is seamless and transparent. Depending on the scope of work, a typical redesign can take anywhere from two to six months. While we do all the hard work, your input is a crucial part of the process and the more efficient you are with it, the faster we can perform. The below chart is an example timeline of a typical redesign.
| Objective | Timeline |
|---|---|
| Connecting, planning | Up to two weeks |
| Client approval of changes | Up to two weeks |
| First draft of redesign | Up to two months |
| Client approval/ changes | Up to two weeks |
| Implement changes | Up to two weeks |
| Final draft of redesign/ beta testing | Up to three weeks |
| Client approval / launch | Up to two weeks |
Planning / Migration
As part of the project, we'll help you migrate any WordPress content like blog posts and post tags. However, depending on our redesign agreement, most page content will be rebuilt from the ground up.
We typically design around the content you have or will create. In some cases, clients are starting a new travel company or just don't have any content yet. In this case, you have a few options:
- Hire us to come up with an overall plan to create it. This will be quoted as part of your branding package.
- Hire a third party to create the content and have them work directly with us.
- Do it yourself.
We include domain migration in the design package. You'll need to provide us a login to your registrar. We'll handle it from there.
No. We will look at your analytics and determine the pages with the traffic you don't want to lose and set up a 301 redirect that tells search engines you have a new site. This will preserve any SEO credit you built up and transfer it to your new site.
Platform
While the layout and implementation may be different between all our clients, we find that the content needs are very similar. Here's a look at what you'll be able to create on your site:
- Staff profiles
- Destinations
- Itineraries
- Blog Posts
- Landing Pages ( for marketing campaigns or promotions)
- General Site pages
- Search Pages
If you've used WordPress, you'll be right at home. Our CMS is very similar but with some improvements specifically geared towards selling travel.
If you haven't, you'll find it easy to get started and intuitive to learn. For the tricky parts, we have robust documentation and a charming little Artificial Intelligence Bot that can help you find the info you need fast.
Out of the box, your site is pre-optimized using SEO best practices for travel. You also have the ability to override any setting like titles, meta descriptions and alt tags on all content. We also have a special SEO tool that allows you to focus a piece of content around a specific keyword. That tool will use a custom semantic indexing algorithm that displays other related keywords that will be less competitive and still bring in quality traffic. See more on our SEO and marketing tools here.
It depends. When you're accepted as a client, we ask for 3 sources of inspiration and send you style personality quiz. Based on this, we submit some initial ideas. Once you give us feedback and we make some changes, we start the implementation and move everything to a live site where you can see the changes take place in a live environment. This process typically takes about 3-4 weeks and can sometimes take up to 2 months depending on your feedback availability. Here's an example timeline of a redesign.
| Objective | Timeline |
|---|---|
| Connecting, planning | Up to two weeks |
| Client approval of changes | Up to two weeks |
| First draft of redesign | Up to two months |
| Client approval/ changes | Up to two weeks |
| Implement changes | Up to two weeks |
| Final draft of redesign/ beta testing | Up to three weeks |
| Client approval / launch | Up to two weeks |
They're all great applications. But there are 3 main issues with these solutions:
- They don't offer itinerary management, destination management or travel buying lifecycle marketing tools. All things that are critical to competing.
- They have too many options that don't relate to what your ultimate goal should be, selling more travel.
- Managing them in-house can be cumbersome and confusing and feel piece meal. We find that our clients get everything they need and love getting new features that are well-thought and relate to what they do.
We will. With Google cracking down on nonencrypted sites, it's more important than ever. As part of your monthly Atlas Republic Platform Charge, you'll get the following:
- An SSL Site certificate (the greenbar in the browser)
- Two-factor authentication signin (in beta)
Launch
Once you've launched, we have several options to help you get the most value out of your new site without out having to do all the work yourself.
- Analytics
- Adwords
- Social Marketing
- Further Design Services
Contact us for a custom quote.
Pricing
The majority of our custom design projects for travel companies come in between $8,000 and $16,000.
Larger projects - those with a lot of tours, or more difficult technical integrations - depend on scope and typically range from $16,000 to $58,000
* This quote does not include the monthly hosting which fee which starts at $49 per site.
Yes, the payment timeline is flexible. Typically you'll invest 50% of the total upon signing of the website redesign proposal and the remainder upon completion. If you need a further breakdown of payments, let us know and we'll make it work for you.