What about http://www.passengersonly.com altough its a retail store, I think its way cooler looking than those…..

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I love Gap Adventures, a outdoor adventure travel tour operator in Canada

Loot at :

http://www.gapadventures.com/

best regards

Claude

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Not sure I’d agree with all those choices.

Considering the amount of money they spent on it, the Travel Mail lacks imagination and is littered with distracting adverts.

Go Girl has a number of usability issues, such as long thin columns of grouped text.

Bales Worldwide stands out for me. Good execution, great use of colour and clear grouping of elements makes it easy to understand and explore – it empathises with the customer.

I also like http://www.leger.co.uk – take a look!

Cheers,
Richard.

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Hmm, don’t agree with a few of your choices there, but I like the tvtrip, extravigator, silverjet and Bales designs. I also think these are the most confidence inspiring, user oriented designs. Makes me trust the companies in other words. The ocean village holidays one makes me seriously cringe!

Think my fav is the silverjet one. Beautiful and elegant.

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Well, it’s nice to have great design but the content is the king. If you have great design with bad content what’s the point?

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SilverJet for me too.

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From your selection it would be a toss up for me between:

* Go Girlfriend – for the nice use of vector graphics, which I’m a sucker for.

Plus they use pink which other than the cliche of ‘pink being for girls’, it’s a wise move because it’s the colour of love, representing kindness and the absence of evil. People identified with pink are usually sociable, communicative and imaginative.

* Extravigator – because of their use of open-source technology. It’s an intelligent and imaginative use of the free forum script http://www.getvanilla.com

* Holiday Pad – because it has a pink logo! And also because it’s a creative use of blogging technology.

Oops sorry, Holiday Pad isn’t on the list. I must crack on with that redesign

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I like the Bales Worldwide one best, really classy.

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SilverJet won a Travolution Award in 2007 for Best Airline Website.

http://www.travolution.co.uk/Articles/2007/04/25/853/Travolution+Awards+2007+-+Winners.html

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Wow. The overall quality of design in all of these examples is enviable! I particularly like the growing use of the blogging platform by sites like Extravigator and Go Girl – you see more and more clever mashups of free platforms such as WordPress now, but not many so beautifully executed.

Bales’ site is a fine example of really clean, crisp design (something I could do with emulating!).

On a purely aesthetic note, I find Travel Mail a bit old school and clunky.

Loads of great stuff in there. Thanks for the posting!

Toby

(Alastair Sawday’s Special Places to Stay)

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Definitely some nice looking websites. Worth considering the strategy of sites like Kayak and Travelzoo. Their sites have a very stripped down look, no pictures or anything indicating you are off on a holiday. And they are selling Billions $$$. They don’t want to distract people with the beaches and mountains. They want them to focus on the deals. Real travellers would rather see the beaches in person on their trip, not when booking it.

Thats my two cents.

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