Client
Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) is the agency of Thailand with the focus of promoting tourism to this Kingdom. ELMNTL serves the three North American offices (New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto) for the promotion of travel to Thailand for the North American and Latin American markets.
ELMNTL was tasked with the complete redesign of TAT’s main North American website: https://thailandinsider.com/
Details
TAT’s previous website (BookThailandNow.com) was a compilation of travel deals, agent listings, blog posts, promotions and announcements without a coherent and clean user experience. When visiting the site, there was no clear indication of what the site stood for or who TAT was, nor gave the user confidence that the information found on the site was legitimate and trustworthy.
Challenge
Our challenge was to start fresh and redesign the user’s experience and build credibility for TAT as the authority for information about Thailand and travel to this coveted destination. The ultimate goal was to organize all of the information, promotions, news, and blog content in a way that was easy for the users to navigate, understand, and want to keep coming back to learn more about Thailand as a destination for travel.
Solution
The first solution was to move away from the “BookThailandNow” branding which evoke feelings of a low budget, promotional offer and rebrand the site to “ThailandInsider.com” which better suits TAT’s identity of providing authoritative information for the country, without coming off as trying to sell its tourism through inexpensive offers. The name ThailandInsider also coincides with the social media profile identity that ELMNTL had been growing for some time.
The homepage was also a highlight in the new website design since we used beautifully-curated photography to highlight the impressive landscapes, video footage in the header to attract new users, and rotating banners with numerous activities that users may be looking for right on the first page. We also integrated our Instagram feed onto the homepage which we already managed and we meticulously curated for a beautiful, modern aesthetic.
Our solution for organization was to address the design for this new website through the POV of the traveler. What are the main points of information one looks for when researching a destination for travel? We answered the following four questions in our design:
- Where do I go?
- Where can I stay?
- What can I do?
- What can I eat?
We used these four main navigation tabs to guide our new design: Regions, Stay, Explore, and Eat. Our content was then categorized to fit one of these 4 categories, with the addition of a Blog category for extra information for our followers.
The Regions page housed all regional, location, and major tourist attraction information for Thailand, coupled with an interactive map to help guide users to learning more about the country.
The Stay page allowed for TAT to highlight all of its hotel partners through their own unique filters according to the type of stay the user was interested in searching for.
The Explore page was our opportunity to highlight all of the activities that Thailand was known for, including: Wellness, Adventure, Eco Tourism, Romance, Entertainment, and even Local community-based experiences.
Finally, the Eat page housed all of the famous cuisine and restaurants that the country is known for.
Later on an additional Packages page was added to help TAT highlight its numerous travel agents and all of the promotions and special offers from their hotel, flight, and activity partners in one convenient location with details, images, and links to the respective travel partner for booking.
