Arctic Travels
View DemoRedesigning a luxury ski & snowboarding travel site — from a one-page brief to a full booking experience, built around trust, restraint, and a persona named Yeti.
Arctic Travels is a luxury ski agency based in Whistler, Canada, offering bespoke trips to 20+ resorts worldwide. The founder, asked for a new landing page. What started there grew into a full site: a resort directory, individual resort pages, a region browser, a seasonal pass product, and a booking flow.
An informal ask, a specific vision
The founder's brief arrived as a direct email — headline copy, a clear point of view on tone, and a vision for the site.
Content requirements
- Headline: "Plan the perfect winter trip"
- CTA: "Book Here" — understated, integrated, not a loud button
- Nav: Regions, Lodging, Resorts, Passes
- Cool-toned palette, aspirational photography
Functional requirements
- Trip planning & booking flow
- Trip tracking for planned holidays
- Live chat with travel agents
- 20+ destinations — Niseko, Chamonix, Zermatt
Persuasion, without pressure
Client's ask was clear in spirit and open in practice: make it feel luxurious, and let the content do the convincing. That's harder than it sounds — most booking sites drive conversions through urgency and repeated CTAs precisely because restraint is a risk.
Conversion by pressure
Urgency banners, repeated CTAs, search-first density. Effective, but it reads as being sold to, not invited.
Conversion by persuasion
Trust, evidence, and pacing do the convincing instead — booking should feel like the traveler's own decision.
So the real design question wasn't how to make the page prettier — it was how to make a quiet page still convert. That meant looking at how other premium, service-led brands solve this exact problem without shouting.
The trust gap
A first-time visitor has zero pre-existing trust in the brand. Unlike an established name, Arctic Travels has to earn trust in the first ten seconds — and "best experience" isn't a trust signal. Verified evidence is.
What builds trust here
- Real traveler photography, not stock imagery
- Verified reviews — star ratings, names, destinations
- Visible travel-agent expertise & human support
- Resort partner credentials (Niseko, Chamonix, Zermatt)
How attention moves on the page
- 1. Image first — the visual anchor
- 2. Headline second — context and purpose
- 3. CTA third — the action
Implication: the CTA belongs after the emotional hook, not before it.
Meet Yeti
Yeti lives the fast-paced, often mundane life of a Silicon Valley professional. After three months of intense work post-Christmas, he's burnt out and craving crisp mountain air. Traveling with family and friends, he feels pressure to get it right — and he'll pay a premium for a bespoke service that removes the logistics, so he can skip booking fatigue and go straight to the adventure.
| Age / Role | 35, Senior IT Engineer |
| Budget | $10,000 – $15,000 |
| Timeline | Spontaneous, 2–3 weeks out |
| Decision style | Social researcher — trusts reviews, consults group chat |
| Frustration | Hours of manual research; fear of a vacation that underdelivers |
What every decision had to pass through
Deciding what shipped first
A MoSCoW pass against the brief's wishlist, the persona's needs, and build feasibility. Live chat with a travel agent was the only true must-have; deal banners were cut outright — they cut against the luxury positioning.
From V1 to V2
| Decision | V1 — Rejected | V2 — Current |
|---|---|---|
| Navigation | Full nav in header — repetitive with cards below | Logo + Contact Us only |
| CTA placement | Floated over the hero — rushed the user | Single CTA after exploration cards |
| Scroll signal | None | Soft bouncing chevron |
| Carousel | Auto-rotating — interrupted trust-building | Manual prev/next |
An early, more minimal pass at the resort detail page — before I landed on the final Arctic Travels navigation and type treatment.
Smooth scroll uses
scrollIntoView({behavior:'smooth'}). No
hover-only interactions anywhere — affluent travelers book
from mobile.
The site
Deep navy and ice-blue, serif display type, full-bleed photography — the Blacklane-style, evidence-led feel research pointed to, built to persuade through content rather than a loud call-to-action.
Landing page
Headline and subheadline straight from the brief. No CTA inside the hero — that follows the CTA strategy: one graceful invitation, placed after trust is established, not before.
Full scrolling page: hero → reviews → Explore Regions → Curated Resorts → Unforgettable Experiences → single closing CTA.
Resort detail
Answers a question I flagged during IA: how does the nav evolve on inner pages? The answer — keep it identical to the landing page, so the low-noise feel carries through the whole site.
The Northern Solstice Resort. Amenities shown as evidence (heated glass domes, private heli-pad), not adjectives.
Featured resorts
A browsable directory extending the 20+ destination requirement into its own page, so no one has to evaluate every resort from the landing page alone.
Global basecamps
Destinations grouped by continent — satisfies the brief's "Regions" entry point without a search-first filter bar dominating the top of the page.
Booking flow
The functional core of the brief — plus the trust signals from research (secure transaction, flexible cancellation) placed right at the point of decision.
A split layout — selection on the left, summary and trust signals on the right — modeled on Blacklane's split-hero pattern.
What's next
Passes, Experiences, and individual region pages are structurally complete but haven't been through visual design yet.
Seasonal passes
Experiences
Region detail
