When you run a travel and tourism website, a CMS can be a significant advantage. However, more often than not, the owners and managers of these businesses and websites are unaware of the benefits of this type of tool, or may never have heard of it to begin with.
A CMS can offer a wide array of benefits that, in turn, may either make or break your travel business.
In this article, we will take a closer look at what a CMS is, why your travel business needs one, and what kind of advances you can derive from using a CMS tool. We will also discuss what to look for when trying to choose a CMS.
What is a CMS?
A CMS, short for content management system, is a software application that allows you to create content, modify it, and manage all your content from a central point, all without needing coding abilities. The easiest way to describe it is as a sort of digital toolbox for building and maintaining websites.
A content management system offers an array of benefits, including the following:
- Creating and editing web pages - A CMS makes it easy to build web pages from scratch, allowing you to add text, images, videos, and other content to your site.
- Organising content - With a well-designed content management system, you can structure your website into pages, sections, and categories.
- Publishing content - A user-friendly CMS makes it easy to publish new content.
- Managing users - A quality CMS system will allow you to edit user permissions, including who can access and edit your website's content.
WebFlow is a brilliant example of a popular CMS that can help to make your tourism business and website easier to manage.
In short, a CMS offers you full control over your website's content and appearance, all without needing extensive technical experience or a background in programming and web design. As a result, any individual can build a website and keep their content up-to-date with minimal effort.
Why do travel websites need a CMS?
There are many different reasons why a travel and tourism website may benefit from a CMS system. These reasons are vast, varied, and Incredibly diverse. Below, we'll discuss just a few of the ways that cms can be of use for your travel business.
It simplifies content management
A CMS simplifies the process of creating, editing, and updating content on a travel website. This includes managing text, images, videos, and other media.
It makes dynamic content updates easy
The travel industry is constantly changing and evolving. As a result, information is constantly changing. Whether it be dates, rates, or locations, a high-quality CMS allows you to update your website’s content quickly and easily to ensure it remains current and accurate.
You can easily incorporate booking and reservation systems
Booking and reservation systems are often an essential part of many travel websites since they often integrate booking systems for flights, hotels, and tours. When you use a quality CMS, it can help you manage these bookings, keep track of reservations, and provide customers with real-time information.
It facilitates simple SEO optimisation
When you use the right CMS, you can configure it to help optimise your website for search engines. Not only does this improve your website’s visibility and attract more organic traffic, but it saves you time and effort. Built-in features like meta descriptions, keyword optimisation, and sitemaps are essential for SEO.
Get and review customer reviews and ratings
As long as you have a reasonable CMS tool, it can facilitate the collection and display of customer reviews and ratings. Not only does this enhance your website’s credibility, but it adds social proof, which makes your pages even more attractive to search engines. The cumulative effect of this is to attract more visitors to your site.
Integration with other systems
Most good CMS systems will allow you to integrate them with additional tools and services. These may include varied and diverse options like third-party payment gateways, secondary CMS systems specifically for social media (or tools that turn your primary CMS into a social media management system), and email marketing platforms.
This capability allows you to streamline operations and provide a better user experience.
Scalability
With any business, having scalable tools is essential. As the business grows, you can rest assured that your tool will grow with the business rather than needing to replace it entirely. The best CMS systems will help you scale your website as your business grows, allowing it to accommodate increased traffic, content, and functionality.
CollaborationWhy choose Webflow as a CMS?
Websites are often a collaborative effort, with many different people being responsible for different parts of the process and content. All the best CMS tools allow you to collaborate with ease, enabling multiple team members to contribute to the website's content, making collaboration easier and more efficient.
Analytics and tracking
As you know, analytics and tracking are essential parts of the web content process. When you use a CMS, it often includes built-in analytics tools. These may allow you to accomplish tasks that allow you to accomplish diverse tasks, including tracking website traffic, user behaviour, and the performance of your marketing campaigns.
All in all, a CMS is a valuable tool for travel websites. It provides the flexibility, efficiency, and scalability you need to succeed in today's competitive online marketplace.
Why choosing the right CMS for your travel business is essential
While there are many advantages to using a CMS for your travel business, the key is to choose one that offers what you need. When you choose a CMS, and it isn’t suited to your business, you may encounter any of the problems discussed below.
You may find yourself spending money on features that don’t benefit your travel website. Many travel companies pay a small fortune for an enterprise CMS solution. While it may be packed with advanced features, they may not ever use them. It’s always better to pay for what you need, rather than pay for features that your site or business isn’t ready for.
In addition to this, many travel brands find themselves paying developers to build functionality that is readily available in a high-quality CMS solution.
While it may make sense in the instance where they require a certain unique functionality, that’s often not the case, turning bespoke CMS solutions into a double-edged sword. They get more personalised functionality, yes, but often at a higher cost. The ongoing maintenance requirements may also be more on a bespoke CMS.
When you choose the wrong CMS or your CMS isn’t set up properly, it can significantly hinder the productivity of your marketing and digital teams. Cumbersome editing processes, a lack of workflows, and a steep learning curve can easily lead to wasted time and frustration.
For these reasons, and many like them, it is essential that you choose the right CMS for your travel brand. Fortunately, there are many excellent options on the market, and Webflow is a leader in the industry. Let’s take a closer look at what you can expect.
Why choose Webflow as a CMS?
There are many popular website builders and CMS platforms on the market, with Webflow being one of the most popular. It offers several advantages when used as a CMS, including the following.
It offers great flexibility in terms of visual design
Some of the CMS tools on the market offer a fairly limited array of visual elements unless you’re willing to code new elements yourself. That isn’t the case with Webflow.
Thanks to its drag-and-drop interface, you can easily create and customise website layouts without writing code. It also offers many interactive components, themes, and other elements that you can use to build dynamic elements like animations, sliders, and forms.
It also offers excellent opportunities for you to design unique system integrations. Using the many visual tools available on this platform, you can easily create and manage design tokens for consistent branding across your website.
It offers powerful CMS features
In terms of pure CMS features, Webflow is pure gold. It offers excellent content management abilities, allowing you to easily create, edit, and manage content on your website. It even allows you to separate your travel content into different collections so you can organise and manage your content in a structured way.
Thanks to the ability to produce dynamic content, you can even create personalised experiences based on user data. Finally, it offers full version control, meaning you can track changes to your website and revert to previous versions if needed.
It has built-In search engine optimisation tools
SEO is an essential part of the modern content creation arena, and Webflow makes Search Engine Optimisation easy thanks to its array of built-in tools.
With access to tools like custom meta titles, meta descriptions, and URL slugs, you can easily optimise your website for search engines.
Webflow's infrastructure also ensures that your website will load quickly, which will improve SEO rankings even further.
Finally, mobile access is an essential part of web design today. Webflow has a mobile-first design, meaning you can create websites that are optimised for mobile devices, another crucial ranking factor for SEO.
It integrates well with other tools
If you want the best possible CMS, you need one that will work well with the other tools and features that you'd like to use. Webflow fits that bill perfectly, giving you access to an array of third-party integrations. You can connect your Webflow site with popular tools like Google Analytics, Mailchimp, and Zapier.
If you are more tech-savvy and you want to dabble with APIs, Webflow allows you to do so. As a result, you can easily customise your website's functionality through API integrations.
It’s scalable
As mentioned earlier, the best CMS systems can scale with your website. Webflow is 100% scalable, allowing you to handle growing traffic with ease. And if the setup you’ve been using is no longer serving your purpose, you can easily add new features and functionality as your business grows.
Access to a helpful community and support
When it comes down to it, there are few platforms that give you easy access to support and community-based information like Webflow does. This platform has an active community where you can easily connect with other Webflow users for support, inspiration, and collaboration.
You also get access to a range of official documentation and tutorials, a whole network of comprehensive resources to help you learn Webflow.
Finally, thanks to Webflow University, you can take online courses to improve your Webflow skills.
It offers excellent hosting and security features
When you use Webflow as a CMS and website-building platform, the platform handles hosting and security, ensuring your website is always up and running. It also offers built-in SSL certificates, allowing you to easily protect your website and user data.
Overall, Webflow offers a powerful and flexible CMS solution that is ideal for designers, developers, and businesses looking to create visually stunning and high-performing travel websites.
Final thoughts
As you can see, there are truly a great many reasons why you may wish to acquire a CMS for your travel and tourism website. Ultimately, it can be an excellent way to save both time and money.
However, trying to choose the right CMS can seem daunting if you have no experience with this kind of application. In these cases, it's generally a good idea to work with an agency that's well-versed in CMS and other similar tools. Have a look at our list of travel and tourism marketing services, and learn how we can help you.
