(Seychelles News Agency) - The Seychelles Tourism Board (STB) has launched its new destination website -- www.seychelles.travel. 

The website, which was launched on Tuesday, took 18 months to build and has a new design, look and feel, with a host of new features.

Digital marketing director at the board, Vihad Jacob, said that the new website has three main sections. “Discover, Plan your Visit and Explore. These are providing visitors with information on everything they need to know about the destination from its geography, climate, history, accommodations, airlines, and destination management companies,” said Jacob.

Jacob said that visitors can use the website to find other activities that they can do in Seychelles -- a group of islands in the western Indian Ocean. “We have also provided itinerary ideas and also how to get around which are all very beneficial to our visitors,” he said. 

According to Jacob the site is a fully responsive website and can adapt to any screen size, thus making it mobile friendly. It also contains an interactive map, on which visitors can get the exact location of all listings on the map.

“The newly redesigned interactive gallery features an image library, immersive 3360-degree photos and videos, destination videos, wallpapers and even the option to send a greeting card from Seychelles,” said Jacob.

The new website is replacing the existing one which has been online for the past four years. It is complementing the Seychelles Tourism Board’s corporate website which was launched last year, making the board one of the few tourism boards in Africa to have a suite of completely responsive websites.

The new website is replacing the existing one which has been online for the past four years. (Thomas Meriton) Photo License: CC-BY

“Over the past four years websites have become fully responsive, as they have become more mobile friendly, so we had to adapt to the changes and we decided about one-and-a-half-years ago to completely redesign the website and come up with one that reflects some of the best tourism board websites in the world,” said Jacob.

The digital marketing director said that the new website involved a lot of work. “Our in-house team went out to take new photos for this new site. The graphics team had to re-design everything, we had to adapt it for mobile. We have inserted over 300 to 400 listings of new accommodations, attractions, activities, boat charters, there is a lot of content,” explained Jacob.

At the ceremony to unveil the new site, the Minister for Tourism, Civil Aviation, Ports and Marine, Didier Dogley, said “the gap between the digital world and tourism is very big. We need to keep information at our audiences’ fingertips. Having the information and a friendly website allows us to have people who keep on dreaming about coming to Seychelles.” 

www.seychelles.travel is currently available in four languages -- English, French, German and Italian. Work to have a Chinese version is currently in the translation phase and should be available later in the year.

The Seychelles Tourism Board Chief Executive, Sherin Francis, congratulated the digital marketing team for the realisation of the project.

“In this fast-moving world, it is important that we keep up with the current trends, and to have a new state-of-the-art website is, at the end of the day, keeping us at par with our competitors in terms of what we are offering to our visitors as a destination,” said Francis.

Jacob said that website will be maintained by the board’s in-house team. “We have people who will be creating content and updating the website. In terms of technical maintenance, we have a contract with the developer Web Seychelles, if there are any issues.”

The new destination website adds to STB’s other digital presence including its corporate website launched last year, as well as the various social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

The previous destination website was recording about 550,000 visitors a year, and it is hoped that the traffic will be doubled with the new website.