Travel agency website study for 2027: what 60 Indian agency sites show Gujarat agencies

The short answer

We checked the homepages of 60 Indian travel agencies on 20 October 2026: 9 did not load at all, and of the 51 that did, 46 (90%) worked over HTTPS and 48 (94%) had a mobile viewport tag, but only 16 (31%) had a WhatsApp link in the homepage HTML. Just 14 of the 51 (27%) passed all four basic checks we ran.

One point first, so nobody reads more into the title than the data allows. The sample is national. It comes from the member lists of two Indian travel trade associations, so it includes agencies from many states and is not a Gujarat only survey. We publish it for Gujarat agencies because that is where most of our clients are, and because the gaps it shows are the same ones we see when we audit agency sites in Ahmedabad, Rajkot and Surat. The full method page is Indian travel agency websites: a 60 site study.

How we ran the study

The method was an automated homepage check, the same script run against every site on the same day. Nothing was judged by eye.

• Pool: 439 unique travel agency domains taken from the public member lists of ADTOI and ATOAI, after removing duplicates and placeholder addresses.
• Sample: 60 domains chosen systematically from the alphabetical list, roughly every seventh one, so no site was picked by hand.
• Date: one run on 20 October 2026.
• Request: one fetch of each homepage with a mobile phone browser user agent and a 20 second timeout, trying https first, then the www address, then plain http.
• Checks: whether the page loaded, whether https worked, whether plain http redirected to https, whether the HTML had a mobile viewport tag, whether it contained a WhatsApp link (wa.me, api.whatsapp.com and similar), its HTML size, its number of script tags, and whether it was built on WordPress.

The results

Percentages below are out of the 51 sites that loaded, except the first row. We do not name any agency in this post, because the pattern matters more than any one business.

Finding 1: about one in seven listed websites did not load

Of the 60 sampled domains, 9 did not load. Seven no longer resolved in DNS, which usually means the domain lapsed or was never renewed. One failed on an expired SSL certificate. One refused our request with an HTTP 403, which may be a firewall blocking automated checks rather than a dead site, so treat that one with care.

For an agency, an expired domain or certificate is the most expensive kind of website problem, because every printed brochure, visiting card and association listing still points travellers to it. A renewal reminder costs nothing. If someone else holds your domain login, get it into your own name this week.

Finding 2: most sites are secure and phone ready on paper

The good news: 90% of the sites that loaded worked over HTTPS, and 94% had a mobile viewport tag. Five sites had no working HTTPS at all, so browsers would mark them as not secure, and nine did not send plain http visitors to the secure address.

A viewport tag is only the minimum for a page to scale on a phone. It does not prove the layout is easy to use on a small screen, so this number is a floor. Our post on why travel agencies lose bookings on mobile covers the checks a script cannot do.

Finding 3: only 31% put WhatsApp on the homepage

This was the biggest gap. Only 16 of the 51 homepages had a WhatsApp link in their HTML, even though WhatsApp is where most Indian travellers send their first message. Among WordPress sites the share was 4 of 17, and among the rest it was 12 of 34. Those subgroups are small, so treat the difference as a hint worth testing.

There is a limit here too. A chat widget added later by JavaScript would not appear in the raw HTML, so a few sites may have a button we could not see. Even so, a plain wa.me link in the page is the most reliable way to make sure the button works on every phone. Our guide to WhatsApp booking for travel agency websites shows how to make the link type the trip name too.

Finding 4: homepages are heavy before a single photo loads

The median homepage carried 150 KB of HTML. Thirty of the 51 were over 100 KB and 18 were over 200 KB, with the largest at 1,373 KB. That is only the HTML: images, fonts and scripts download on top. The median page also had 18 script tags, and 17 pages had more than 30.

WordPress homepages in the sample had a median of 191 KB of HTML, against about 65 KB for the rest. Much of that weight comes from page builders, sliders and plugin stacks, which are common on WordPress travel sites. A lean WordPress theme can stay light. On a patchy mobile connection, every extra 100 KB adds waiting time before the traveller sees a package.

What this means for a Gujarat travel agency

If you run an agency in Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Rajkot or Surat, these five checks take ten minutes on your own phone and fix most of what the study found.

• Open your site address with and without https. Both should end on the secure https page.
• Check who holds your domain and when it renews. Put the renewal date in your calendar.
• Look for a WhatsApp button on the homepage and on every package page, and test that it opens a chat.
• Open your homepage on mobile data, away from office wifi, and count the seconds until you see a package.
• Remove sliders, autoplay video and plugins that nobody on your team can explain.

Limitations of this study

We want this data to be quoted correctly, so here is what it does not show.

• Sixty sites is a small sample. Treat every percentage as a snapshot with a margin of several points either way.
• Association members who list a website skew toward established operators. Small agencies without a listing are not covered.
• The sample is national. It is not a census of Gujarat agencies, and state level figures cannot be read from it.
• We checked one homepage once, on one day. Sites change, and a site that was down on 20 October 2026 may be back.
• A static HTML check misses anything injected later by JavaScript, such as some chat widgets, and cannot judge design quality, content or how fast the full page renders.

Want your own site checked?

For examples of agency sites that already pass these checks, see travel agency website examples from Gujarat. If you want the service itself, our page on travel agency website design in Ahmedabad explains what we build and how.

Call us on 7383552512 or message us on WhatsApp with your website address, and we will run the same checks on your homepage and send you the results. If you would rather see a fix than a report, ask for a free demo of your travel website.