Category Archives: Branding & Design

We are proud to share that we have become the first New Zealand agency to be named a finalist in the global Skift IDEA Awards, recognised in the "Industry Innovators: Tourism" category for our work creating the new Tonga Tourism destination brand.

More than 490 entries from around the world were submitted for the 2026 Skift IDEA Awards, which recognise innovative work shaping the future of travel and tourism.

Our finalist entry, “By the people, for the people – a living brand,” recognises our people-led approach to developing Tonga’s new destination brand, placing Tongan tourism stakeholders and communities at the heart of the research and brand development process.

“This is fantastic recognition for the Tomahawk team and, most importantly, for our partners at Tonga...

Your website might be attracting plenty of visitors, but if they're leaving without booking, your user experience (UX) could be letting you down. The good news? Small improvements often have a surprisingly big impact on direct bookings. In this article, we'll share seven UX features that help turn more website visitors into paying guests.

We design tourism websites with a focus on user experience and converting visitors to book. In this article, we'll walk through the seven UX features that make the biggest difference for tourism operators looking to boost direct bookings and reduce reliance on OTA commissions.

Quick guide: 7 UX features that drive bookings

• Mobile-first responsive design: Captures the majority of travel traffic with fast, thumb-friendly...

We have officially welcomed our newest team member, Chip, an AI-generated T-Hawk with a smooth voice and endless enthusiasm for tourism and digital marketing. Well...technically he isn't that new. Chip was assembled somewhere in Silicon Valley and now calls a high-performance data centre home. It's warm, it's noisy, and apparently the Wi-Fi is excellent!

Chip is the voice behind Sound Advice for Tourism, our brand-new audio knowledge hub that brings its most popular tourism marketing resources to life for busy people who prefer listening over reading.

Each episode transforms one of our blogs or marketing guides into a short, conversational audio experience with actionable advice without the jargon.

"We wanted to make our content more accessible," says Renee Goodsell, our...

Typography is often one of the most overlooked yet influential elements of a tourism brand. When thinking about branding, one often tends to focus on logos, colours, photography, or storytelling. The fonts, however, are often overlooked or taken for granted. I have always believed that typography is the invisible thread that ties all your brand communications together and creates a sense of trust when used consistently. For tourism businesses, where experiences are often sold long in the ‘Dream’ stage, before they are lived, typography becomes a powerful tool for setting expectations. 

Font Terminology

Before we talk about the importance of typography, let's clear up some terminology. You may have heard words like fonts, font family, typeface, type, and typography being...

When many people hear the word “brand”, they immediately think of logos, colours, fonts, or maybe a slick-looking website. And while those things are important, they are only the surface layer of branding.

Your brand is not your logo.

Your brand is the feeling people associate with your business. It’s the reputation you build over time. It’s what customers say about you when you’re not in the room.

A logo is simply the visual identifier attached to that reputation.

This misunderstanding is one of the biggest marketing myths we still see, particularly in tourism and hospitality, where businesses often invest heavily in visual design but underestimate the importance of consistency, customer experience, and trust.

Brand is Built Through Experience

Think about...

We often talk about how tourism websites should be designed with one goal in mind: attract visitors from search engines (mostly Google) and convert them into bookings. While that objective remains the same, the way travellers discover and interact with tourism businesses is changing rapidly.

With AI-powered search experiences becoming increasingly common, travellers are no longer simply clicking through lists of search results. They're asking questions, receiving recommendations, comparing options, and planning itineraries directly within AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode/Overviews, Perplexity and more.

Given this, your website has three audiences to consider:

• Human visitors looking to book
• Traditional search engines 
• AI search tools looking to...