Travel landing page CRO checklist

A travel landing page has one job: convert a person who is interested in a destination into a person who has told you what they want. Everything on the page either advances that or gets in its way.

This checklist follows the order a traveller actually consumes the page, which is not the order most travel pages are built in.

Above the fold

You have a few seconds to answer "am I in the right place, and is this in my range". Four elements do that:

• A headline naming the exact trip. "7 Days in Vietnam — Hanoi, Halong Bay & Hoi An", not "Discover Vietnam".
• A price band. "From ₹X per person, twin sharing". The single most effective qualifying element on the page.
• Duration and departure options. Nights, and which cities you depart from.
• A primary call to action that says what happens next — "Get the full itinerary & price" beats "Submit".

Hero imagery should be one strong image, properly compressed, with explicit dimensions so nothing shifts as it loads. A carousel above the fold delays your largest contentful paint and is almost never worth its cost.

The proof strip

Immediately below the fold, a compact row of genuine credibility markers: your registration or licence, verified review rating with a link to the source, years operating, travellers served. Every item must be true and checkable. A fabricated rating is worse than no rating, because travellers check.

What is included, what is not

Two clear columns. Inclusions and exclusions. This section prevents more wasted sales calls than any other, because the questions it answers — are flights included, are visas included, is it all meals or breakfast only — are exactly the ones that end a conversation twenty minutes in.

Be explicit about the awkward ones. Visa fees, airport transfers, travel insurance, GST and TCS where applicable. Travellers who discover these on a call feel misled; travellers who read them on the page feel informed.

The itinerary

Day-by-day, collapsible, with the first day or two expanded by default so the format is obvious. Each day needs a title, two or three lines of substance, and the meals and accommodation category included.

Name the hotels, or at least the category and an example property. "3-star accommodation" tells an experienced traveller nothing and makes a cautious one suspicious.

The enquiry form

Form design is where most travel pages lose the enquiries they had already earned.

• Five to six fields maximum. Name, phone, travel month, travellers, departure city. Email optional if you have the phone number.
• Correct input types. A telephone field with a numeric keypad. A traveller on a phone should never have to switch keyboards.
• Dropdowns, not free text, for anything you intend to report on.
• Inline validation that explains the problem in words, not a red border alone.
• A visible WhatsApp alternative. A significant share of Indian travel enquirers will never fill a form but will happily send a message.
• A clear statement of what happens next — "We will send the detailed itinerary and price within 2 hours" — and then honour it.

Objection handling

A short FAQ block answering the real hesitations: what the payment schedule is, what the cancellation policy is, whether the itinerary can be customised, what happens if the visa is refused, who accompanies the group. These are the questions that stop someone submitting, and answering them on the page costs you nothing.

Mobile performance

Most Indian travel traffic is mobile, frequently on a mid-range device and an inconsistent connection. Performance is a conversion issue, not an engineering vanity metric.

• Serve modern image formats at the size actually displayed — not a 2400px hero on a 390px screen.
• Set explicit width and height on every image to eliminate layout shift.
• Defer everything not needed for the first paint, including chat widgets and review scripts.
• Keep the primary CTA reachable — a sticky bar on mobile is worth its screen cost.
• Tap targets at least 44px, with real spacing between them.

Instrumentation

A page you cannot measure is a page you cannot improve. Before launch, confirm you are tracking: form starts as well as submissions, WhatsApp and call taps, itinerary expansions, scroll depth, and field-level abandonment if your form is long enough to warrant it.

The gap between form starts and form submissions is one of the most informative numbers on the page, and almost nobody measures it.

The first four tests worth running

1. Price band visible vs hidden, judged on qualified enquiries. Expect fewer enquiries and better ones.
2. Short form vs long form. Same judgement criterion.
3. CTA wording. Outcome-specific ("Get the full itinerary & price") against generic ("Enquire Now").
4. WhatsApp prominence. Secondary link versus equal-weight primary option.

Run one variable at a time, define the success metric before launching, and give each test enough traffic and enough time to cover a full weekly cycle. Travel enquiry behaviour on a Sunday evening is not the same as a Tuesday morning, and a three-day test will mislead you.