A New Travelocity Homepage Lands

Monday brings a new homepage from Travelocity. Its certainly a change from the past with a broad swath for marketing messages across the top of the home page. In fact, the current message is so jarring, we almost thought we had ended up at some sort of Swedish rental car site. Not quite sure why that huge yellow stripe at the top of the otherwise blue page is there - bringing cheery news about H1N1 - that is quite a marketing message.

That said, the new focus is clearly on bringing deals to the forefront. Across the top and down the right hand side and in numerous tabs are plugs for deals, deals and more deals. They still don't appear to be customized or focused (at least on the home page) but Travelocity is clearly dialing up the promotional content.

And Henry Harteveldt would be proud - the "ExperienceFinder" has been prominently moved up to the top navigation bar - Henry has previously bemoaned Travelocity for taking one of their best features and hiding it in no-mans land.

But, other than a slightly revised layout and new row of tabs across the top, we don't see a huge sea of change here. In fact, we really have to question why the search button (which enables a user to actually engage with the site on the home page!) has been moved beneath the fold.