A good friend and colleague of mine (Mo from TravelOregon.com) in the Travel and Tourism industry notified me about the new VisitFlorida.com website today. Having worked on the TravelOregon.com website myself as well as a number of other travel-related websites, I have to say I’m pretty floored by the VisitFlorida folks for their extreme “web 2.0″ approach to their new site, even if I don’t personally agree it makes for the best user experience.

Starwood recently launched their new Preferred Guest site. Note the usage of rich imagery as the backdrop for the whole site (in fact, refresh the page a few times, as there is different photos in the rotation). I’m a big fan of this for travel sites, as I mentioned in previous posts.

Simplified navigation options, simple calendar controls, great use of AJAX search for the destination search box too.
Nice work Starwood. Hope the rest of your brand sites are on their way to similar improvements.