A brand kit for a travel agency: what goes in it and where it is used

A brand kit for a travel agency is the short list of decisions that makes every post, flyer, quotation, voucher and email look like one business: a full, a light and a square logo, colours with the text colour that reads on each, a typeface pair for every script you sell in, one contact line, your licence numbers, a photo style and a tone of voice.

What a travel brand kit holds

A kit is not a style guide in a drawer. It is the handful of facts that every person in the agency, and every tool they use, should draw from instead of retyping. For the travel trade it has seven parts.

Write it down once, decide who may change it, and put it where the tools can read it.

Logos: one full, one light, one square

A common starting point is one logo file, dark on white, and a lot of improvising. It sits in a white box on a photograph, disappears on the brand colour, and is cropped into a circle for the WhatsApp profile with half the name missing.

Three files solve that:

• The full logo on a transparent background, for light backgrounds.
• A light version in white or a pale colour, for photographs and dark panels.
• A square mark: the symbol alone, or initials, for profile pictures, small spaces and anywhere the full name would be unreadable. Profile pictures are often shown as a circle, so test the mark inside one; the other shapes each channel uses are in social media image sizes for travel.

Then two rules: a clear space around the logo of at least the height of one letter of its name, and a smallest size below which you switch to the mark. On a flyer the logo belongs small, at a corner or in the contact line; the trip sells the trip, and the logo tells the reader who to call.

In iTravel Studio the Brand page holds exactly these three: the logo, a logo for dark backgrounds, and a square mark, each a PNG, JPEG or WebP of up to 4 MB. Studio's templates set the logo on a small chip of your paper colour, so it reads on any photograph; with no logo uploaded, the brand name stands in its place.

Colours: roles, not a palette

A palette of six colours you like is not yet a kit. What the kit needs is a role for each colour, because the role decides where it may appear:

• Brand colour: headings, bands, buttons.
• Second colour: panels and shapes.
• Accent: a small touch, such as a badge, a rule or the price.
• Text colour: words on light backgrounds.
• Paper colour: the page, and words on dark backgrounds.

Then check the contrast of words on each colour. The WCAG contrast guideline asks for at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text (18 point, or 14 point bold). Travel brands are easy to get wrong here, because sea, sand and sky colours are pale.

A worked example, with the ratios calculated by the WCAG formula:

The lesson: a pale brand colour is fine for a button or a band, as long as the words on it are dark.

Studio works with these same five roles. It can suggest colours read from your logo in your own browser, which you accept with one click or ignore. Every template uses the roles rather than fixed colours, and words placed on a brand colour use your paper or your text colour, whichever reaches 4.5:1, falling back to white or near-black, whichever is stronger. So words on a coral band or button come out dark. If you leave the accent empty, Studio uses a light tint of your brand colour (or a deeper shade when the brand colour is itself pale), so set an accent of your own if you want a call to action in a colour you chose. The check before every download also flags any words under 4.5:1, or 3:1 for large type, on a plain background.

Typefaces for every script you sell in

An agency that sells to the Gulf, India, Thailand or China writes in scripts a Latin typeface simply does not contain. When the font has no Arabic or Devanagari letters, the device substitutes one, and your flyer ends up in two unrelated typefaces.

Decide a pair, one for headings and one for text, for each script you actually use, and check three things:

• Matching weight and feel across scripts, so the Arabic and the English versions of a post look like the same brand.
• Line height. Some scripts need far more vertical room than Latin; Urdu written in Nastaliq most of all.
• No letter-spacing or fake italics on scripts that do not use them, such as Arabic, the Indian scripts and Thai.

Studio's Brand page holds one pair, headings and text, for each of 14 writing systems: Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Urdu, Hebrew, Devanagari, Bengali, Tamil, Thai, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese and Korean. Each starts with a default pair, and Studio picks the right one for each language a design is written in. It keeps a minimum line height per script and never spaces out the letters of Arabic, Urdu, the Indian scripts or Thai. In a right-to-left design, your phone number and website still read left to right. Multilingual travel marketing covers the writing side.

The contact line and your licence numbers

The contact line is the part of the brand a client actually uses. Fix its contents and its order, and use it the same way everywhere:

• the phone or WhatsApp number, in international format with the country code;
• the email and the website;
• the address only where walk-in clients matter;
• the social handles you really answer on;
• one call to action, such as "WhatsApp us to book".

Licence numbers belong in the kit too: your registration with a tourism authority, a trade association membership, an accreditation. Show only the ones you hold and are entitled to show, in the form the scheme asks for, and take any scheme logo from the scheme itself. Some schemes and markets expect the number on every advert; check what yours says.

Studio's kit holds the phone, WhatsApp, email, website and address, a call to action, and handles for Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn and X. The editor's "Your brand" list offers only the facts the kit holds, so nobody adds an empty phone line. The Brand page has no field for a licence number yet, so put it in a design's small print and save that design as one of your own templates, which your team then starts from. What makes a travel flyer sell shows where it sits on the page.

Photo style and tone of voice

These two are written rules, not files, and they are what makes a brand recognisable before anyone reads the logo.

Photo style. Decide what your photographs show (people in the place, or the place alone), how they are lit (real light, not heavy filters), what is never used (photos with another company's watermark, hotel or airline logos you have no right to, the same stock couple everyone uses), and that every photo is cleared for advertising. Free travel photos for commercial use explains the licences.

Tone of voice. Write five examples rather than five adjectives:

• how you name a trip ("Bali, 5 nights", not "Bali Bliss Getaway");
• how you state a price ("From 699 per person, twin share");
• how you greet clients on the occasions your markets celebrate (see festival posts for travel agencies);
• the words you never use;
• whether you write "we" or the agency's name.

How Studio keeps the kit on every design

A kit only helps if it is the first thing every design reads. Studio, which is in early access, does it like this:

• Filled on the first day. The first kit is made from the account's branding: the logo, the brand colour, the phone, WhatsApp, email, website and address, and the Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn handles. Nobody types the brand twice. From then on the kit is Studio's own to change.
• Read, not copied. A template's colours, logo, contact line and call to action come from the kit each time the design is drawn. Change your number once on the Brand page and every design still using the kit's line shows the new one; its next download is made fresh rather than handed back from the old file.
• Changed by the right people. Only the account's administrator and people with its branding permission can see or save the Brand page.
• Templates already in your brand. The template gallery is drawn in your kit, your language and your currency, so what you pick is what you get.

The checklist for your kit

• Three logo files: full on transparent, light, square mark. Clear space and smallest size written down.
• Five colour roles: brand, second, accent, text, paper.
• Contrast checked: 4.5:1 for normal words on every colour you put words on, 3:1 for large type.
• A typeface pair per script you sell in, with matching weight, and line height checked in the longest language.
• One contact line: phone or WhatsApp in international format, email, website; address only if walk-ins matter.
• One call to action, written as the action.
• Licence and registration numbers you hold and may show, in the scheme's own form.
• Photo rules: what you show, what you never use, every photo cleared for advertising.
• Tone: five written examples, from trip names to greetings.
• One owner who may change the kit, and everyone else drawing from it rather than retyping.