Caribbean.co.uk

Review by Adrian Mann, owner of Adrian Mann Design, providing independent reviews and analysis of travel web sites in the UK.

Caribbean.co.uk, from the Caribbean Tourism Organisation, was launched on 27 January 2002. Its aim is to provide UK travel agents with all the latest news and information for travel to the 34 destinations in the region.

Overall
It’s a fresh, vibrant looking site – which comes as a welcome reminder that there are places in the world where it does something other than rain! Homepage download time on a 56kb modem was clocked at 18.8 seconds, which seems quite surprising at first, considering the look of the page. However, besides the large background graphic, there are actually few images, with the colourful look being achieved through good design.

There are plenty of links, which are grouped in to areas such as ‘Places to Go’ and ‘Things to Do’, a list of activities, such as golf, diving and music, and links to find specialist Caribbean travel agents. There’s also an interactive map.

Content
One of the first places to have a look at is the interactive map. This creates a window that then loads a 190kb Flash file. It’s worth the wait – the quality of the map is excellent. It features clickable links to all the named destinations in the Caribbean, and there’s also a drop-down menu. Clicking on a destination brings up a small ‘Post it’ style item, which has links to ‘Read On’, for detailed information, or ‘Quick Facts’ for an overview of the basics.

These links create a new HTML page, so unless you’re careful you can rapidly end up with a screen full of windows. However, if you choose to use the drop-down menus rather than the map, this isn’t a problem. The information pages are well designed, and have all the facts you’d expect to find – links to weather and climate, country facts, currency converter, brochure ordering, and further links to local tourist board sites.

The activities pages are similarly well organised and informative. For instance, the Diving page has basic information on the various diving options that are available – snorkelling, diving adventures, scuba, with each section having further information and links to relevant diving pages, for instance, if you want a diving adventure, and fancy the Cayman Islands, there’s a link to www.divecayman.ky, which has all the information you’d need to plan the trip. This format is repeated for all the other activities on offer.

After browsing for a while and dreaming of your holiday, you may want to find a travel agent to talk to. On the homepage, there’s a link to a ‘Find and Agent’ page, which allows you to search by nearest town or city, county or by travel agent name. There’s also a clickable map, and links to UK tour operators and airlines.
Other information includes a selection of FAQ’s that are organised into areas such as weather, medical, safety, money and so on. There’s also a competition to win a holiday in the Caribbean, and most pages have the option of emailing them to a friend.

Summary
A thoroughly enjoyable site. Even if you aren’t planning a trip to the Caribbean, it’s worth taking some time to have a look around a really good tourist information site. Its very well thought out and designed, and makes good use of colour and imagery to really capture the feel and communicate it to you. The design is consistently carried throughout the site, and this really helps to build a feeling of trust and confidence. It’s also a multi-lingual site, with versions available in German, Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian and US English, although these versions don’t feature the interactive map of the UK version.

As ever, no site is perfect, but this one was better than most. Only one broken link was found, and some of the pages had a tendency to refresh or redraw for no apparent reason, but overall it performed quickly and smoothly. Have a look round this site, then look out of the window at our dismal grey weather – you may be tempted to find your local travel agent and book a holiday right now.