What a travel website costs, and where it goes
Two suppliers read the same brief and quote figures ten times apart. Neither of them is lying. They are pricing different projects, because the brief described an appearance and not a scope.
Why one brief produces ten different numbers
"A ten-page website for our tour company, with a booking form, in English and Vietnamese." That sentence is compatible with a fortnight of work and with six months of it.
| The same phrase | Read cheaply | Read properly |
|---|---|---|
| Ten pages | Ten copies of one template with placeholder text | Ten pages written for a specific buyer, each with its own photographs |
| A booking form | An email form with a date field | Live availability, options, holds, payment and a confirmation |
| In two languages | The interface translated, the content run through a machine | Every sentence written twice and maintained twice, forever |
| Search engine optimised | A plugin installed and a checklist ticked | Structure, speed and content done as the site is built |
Before comparing prices, make each supplier restate your brief in the right-hand column's language. Two quotations are comparable only when both describe the same project, and the cheap one has usually answered a different question.
Three groups of cost, and the second is the one that overruns
Building it
Design, templates, code, integrations, testing, launch. This is the group in the quotation, and the group everyone argues about.
It is visible, bounded and, on a normal project, the least surprising line.
Filling it
Writing, photographs, translations, product data, itineraries, prices, policy pages. Usually not in the quotation at all.
Where budgets break — the only group the supplier cannot finish without you.
Running it
Hosting, domain, certificate, maintenance, updates, changes and the person who makes them.
Invisible until year two, when it arrives all at once.
Almost every overrun we have seen began in the second group. The build finished on time, then sat waiting for text, photographs and a Vietnamese version of forty pages nobody had been assigned to write. The site went live months late with content written in a hurry by whoever was free.
When a quotation arrives, mark which of the three groups each line belongs to. If nothing is in group two, that work has not disappeared — it has been assigned to you without being mentioned.
Photography is the line everybody deletes first
It is also the line that decides whether the site sells anything. A traveller comparing three operators compares photographs long before itineraries.
- Usable photographs are of your product, your vehicles, your guides and the places you actually go — not a similar beach.
- They exist in the shapes the site needs: wide banner, square card, tall phone screen. One landscape image does not become all three without loss.
- They are licensed permanently, and where people are recognisable there is permission to publish.
- They look like one company, which means one photographer or one brief, not five sources.
The real cost of a shoot is a day of somebody's time, travel, a vehicle or guide out of service, editing, and delivery in the sizes the site needs. Stock photography avoids that and carries a different cost: the same image sits on a competitor's homepage, and a buyer who has seen it twice trusts you less.
The middle path suits most operators. Shoot the pages that carry the money and the homepage; use licensed images for context pages; never use a stock photograph as the first thing a visitor sees.
A second language multiplies content, not code
This is the most common budgeting mistake in travel websites, and it runs in both directions. People expect the second language to double the development cost, and it does not. They do not expect it to double the content cost forever, and it does.
- Development pays once for the mechanism: routing, templates, hreflang, the switcher, the forms. The second language costs a fraction of the first build.
- Content pays every time: every page, product description, meta description, FAQ answer and policy page, in both languages.
- Maintenance pays forever. A price change is two edits, a new tour is two pages, and a site whose second language is not maintained looks abandoned in it.
- Machine translation is a false economy in travel specifically. It reads as unserious at the exact moment a buyer is deciding whether to send money abroad.
Add a language when there is a named person who will maintain it, not when you hope to enter that market. A well-maintained site in one language outsells a half-updated site in three.
The lines nobody budgets until year two
| Item | What it costs | How it goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | Small annually, per domain | It renews into a personal account of somebody who has left the company |
| Certificate | Often free and automatic, sometimes not | It expires on a Saturday and every browser shows a warning |
| Hosting | Monthly, and it should follow your season | Sized for a quiet month, then the season arrives |
| Maintenance | Monthly or per incident | Skipped for a year, then a framework version forces a large job at once |
| Content changes | Per change, or a retainer | Priced per hour without a rate ever being agreed in writing |
| Form delivery | Small, ongoing | Enquiries land in spam for weeks before anyone notices |
Year two is where a good site quietly becomes a bad one: the build was budgeted, the launch was celebrated, and nothing was set aside for keeping it correct. Ask for the year-two figure in the same document as the build price.
What an unusually cheap quotation is not telling you
Cheap is not automatically wrong. A template site with honest content and real photographs beats an expensive empty one. The risk is not knowing what is missing.
- The design is a purchased template with your logo on it — fine if you were told, a problem if you were not.
- The content is placeholder text or a machine translation, and filling it is your job on a deadline you have not seen.
- There is no booking integration, only a contact form. That is a different product and it changes what the site can earn.
- There is no handover of source, credentials or accounts, so every future change must be bought from the same supplier, and maintenance is priced only when you need it urgently.
Ask what will be invoiced separately during the first eighteen months. A supplier who has thought about the project answers in specifics; a supplier who has not says nothing will be.
Questions to ask before you sign
- What exactly is included in this figure, and what will be invoiced separately in the first eighteen months.
- Who writes the text, who approves it, and what happens to the timeline if approval is slow.
- Who supplies photographs, under what licence, and who maintains the second language after launch.
- Who owns the domain, hosting, analytics and source code on the day the relationship ends, and what year two costs.
- What is the change process after launch, and what is the rate.
- What counts as finished — the site being live, or the site taking a booking that reaches your inbox and your payment account.
The last one matters most in travel. A site that exists and a site that sells are different deliverables, and the gap between them is where disputes happen.
Ranges, and why there is no number on this page
A published figure is a number somebody holds you to for a project they have not described, so what follows are brackets by scope, not by price.
| Bracket | What it is | What moves it up |
|---|---|---|
| Presence | A few pages, your own text and photographs, an enquiry form | Page count, and needing content written for you |
| Operator site | Product pages with itineraries, prices and enquiry handling | The number of products, and how messy the existing catalogue is |
| Selling site | Live availability, options, online payment, confirmations | Gateway approval, integration with an existing system, refund rules |
| Network or DMC | Several sites, multilingual, shared product data | Languages, ongoing content, keeping the sites from diverging |
Find your bracket, then read the middle column of the row below it. That is the next step, in scope terms, before anyone quotes a figure.
Indicative ranges and the way we calculate them are on the pricing page, and every project is quoted against written scope; the work itself is described under travel websites. If the site has to take bookings, read choosing a booking engine first — that choice moves the budget more than the design does.
What travel operators ask us most
Is a template site always a bad idea?
No. For a small operator with good photographs and honest descriptions, a template site that goes live this month is better than a bespoke one that goes live next year.
It becomes a bad idea when the template fights the product — when your itineraries or pricing rules do not fit the shapes it was built for, or when it cannot be connected to a booking system later.
Who should write the content, us or the supplier?
Whoever will actually do it. A supplier writing from your notes produces a usable first draft faster than an owner who intends to write it at weekends and does not.
What does not work is leaving it unassigned. That is the single most common reason a website project runs months late.
How long should a travel website take?
A site with a booking engine connected is typically four to eight weeks from signed scope to live, assuming content and photographs already exist.
The variable is almost never the code. It is content readiness, and anything that waits on a payment gateway approval, which is outside any supplier's control.
Should we rebuild or repair what we have?
Repair, if the site can be edited at template level, ranks for anything, and the problem is speed, structure or a missing booking flow. That is usually the cheaper and lower-risk path.
Rebuild when the platform blocks the changes you need, or when the content itself has to be rewritten anyway — at that point you are paying for group two either way.
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