How To Craft An Effective CTA To Increase Travel Bookings

December 08, 2019
Lucas Ennis (he/him)
4 min read

As a travel company or tour operator, bookings are the life of your business. They are what allow you to fulfill your goals of delivering an outstanding experience to travelers and earn a living at the same time.

It makes sense then for you to help travelers along at any stage of the online sales funnel.  Whether it is to provide them with more information, get their email address for marketing purposes, or prompt them to make a booking, using a CTA travel button can help you to achieve this.

Download FREE eBook

The Ultimate Guide To Scaling Your Tour Operator Business

A 150-page guide that covers everything from establishing a winning travel brand to delivering a market-leading service

Get My Free Guide

What Is A Travel CTA?

A CTA travel button is a clear-cut call to action strategically placed on your website or online. Its purpose is to elicit a particular response from people immediately.

Depending on the action you to be taken, CTA’s can be crafted to drive a variety of responses. They are commonly used to simplify how travelers contact you, send an inquiry, sign up for a newsletter, download a free resource, or make a booking, among other things.

Get Your Guide's Unmissable CTA

Get Your Guide’s unmissable home page CTA

Now, not everyone who lands on your website will be ready to book right away. Instead, they may want to find out more information first, or get to know your brand better before committing to a reservation. This is why we say that CTA travel buttons can be used at any stage of the sales funnel.

We will explore this in a bit more detail in the next section.

Types Of CTA’s

Here are some of the common examples of travel CTA’s that you might find useful for your travel or tour website.

Learn More

There may be cases when you have to truncate or only provide highlights to your latest tour online. This could be on your home page, your social media profiles, email newsletters, etc. In this case, you can use a Learn More CTA to direct potential clients to your booking page, where they will be able to get more details on your travel offering.

Contact Us

This CTA should be used when you think clients may want to get in touch with you directly. When clicked on, it allows travelers to instantly email or message you without being directed elsewhere.

Possible uses for this CTA travel button could be on your social media pages, online industry directories, or in promotional materials that you share on other platforms aside from your website. Placed optimally, they can simplify the process needed for clients to get in touch with you.

Inspired By Iceland FB messenger Learn More CTA

Inspired by Iceland’s Facebook Send Message CTA

Sign Up

If you are looking to build your email database for marketing purposes, or help people to get to know your brand better, using a Sign Up CTA on your website or blog can be effective.

This CTA travel button can provide a link for travelers to learn more about your values, or stay up to date with your newest offers, by signing them up to receive your newsletter or latest blog posts.

Do let subscribers know what they are signing up for when they click on the CTA - the last thing you want is to spam anyone who wasn't willing to receive regular (or certain) communication from you.

Download The Guide

As an expert in your niche, you can create a lead magnet in the form of a useful guide or how-to article, and use it to establish your authority as a leader in the industry.

To access or download the guide from your website, ask travelers to provide you with their email address. Again, this will provide you with the opportunity to grow your email marketing database and potentially convert leads to sales in the future.

Book Now

Now for the most valuable of the CTA travel buttons – the Book Now button. This should lead customers directly to the booking form where they can fill out their details, reserve their spot, and pay their deposit.

Using the WeTravel platform, you can embed this CTA directly onto your website. Otherwise, it will appear on the booking page that you create and send to clients.

WeTravel Book Now button

Embed WeTravel’s book now button on your website

CTA Travel Best Practices

Positioning

Generally speaking, a Book Now travel CTA should be placed above the fold on a web page to give it a better chance of being noticed. This is because you want to make it as easy as possible for clients to locate.

Keep in mind that your home page and navigation bar can feature several CTA's including Learn More, Book Now, and Contact Us. This will help visitors to your website to quickly perform those actions no matter which page they are on.

Coloring and Size

Another surefire way to ensure that your CTA travel button can be easily located is to design it to stand out against the background. This means using one of your brand colors on it to make it pop out and be easily seen. You want to make it known where you want people to click.

Size-wise, it should be large enough to be easily seen without taking over too much of the screen space. If it feels like an unwanted pop-up or advertisement instead of a helpful CTA, people might avoid engaging with it.

Trafalgar CTA above the fold

Trafalgar’s prominent Booking CTA

Language

Quite simply, the language you use in your CTA should tell people what to do next. That is to say, provide a clear instruction like Book Now, Sign Up, Get the Guide, etc.

In line with the theme of quick and simple, there are also best practices when it comes to the number of words that make for the most effective CTA travel buttons. Keep it short and sweet with text copy of between two and five words. These should be convincing and inspire action in a person. They should also do exactly what they promise.

Insider tip: Did you know that you can customize the text and color of the WeTravel Book Now button? Learn more in the link.

The Bottom Line

While your CTA buttons can be used to motivate any number of responses in travelers, ideally, they should result in travel bookings for your business. Therefore, you need to know how to use them correctly so that you can provide a simple and effective way for your clients to do just this.