Create your Travel Booking Website with Travel Agency Theme

Travel Agency is a free Word­Press theme that you can use to cre­ate stun­ning and func­tional travel and tour book­ing web­site. It is light­weight, respon­sive, and SEO friendly. It is com­pat­i­ble with WP Travel Engine, a Word­Press plu­gin for travel booking.

It is also trans­la­tion ready. So you can trans­late your web­site into any language.

Travel is the move­ment of peo­ple between dis­tant geo­graph­i­cal loca­tions. Travel can be done by foot, bicy­cle, auto­mo­bile, train, boat, bus, air­plane, ship or other means, with or with­out lug­gage, and can be one way or round trip. Travel can also include rel­a­tively short stays between suc­ces­sive move­ments, as in the case of tourism.

Travel dates back to antiq­uity where wealthy Greeks and Romans would travel for leisure to their sum­mer homes and vil­las in cities such as Pom­peii and Baiae. While early travel tended to be slower, more dan­ger­ous, and more dom­i­nated by trade and migra­tion, cul­tural and tech­no­log­i­cal advances over many years have tended to mean that travel has become eas­ier and more acces­si­ble. Mankind has come a long way in trans­porta­tion since Christo­pher Colum­bus sailed to the new world from Spain in 1492, an expe­di­tion which took over 10 weeks to arrive at the final des­ti­na­tion; to the 21st cen­tury where air­craft allow travel from Spain to the United States overnight.

Travel in the Mid­dle Ages offered hard­ships and chal­lenges, how­ever, it was impor­tant to the econ­omy and to soci­ety. The whole­sale sec­tor depended (for exam­ple) on mer­chants deal­ing with/​through car­a­vans or sea-voy­agers, end-user retail­ing often demanded the ser­vices of many itin­er­ant ped­dlers wan­der­ing from vil­lage to ham­let, gyrovagues (Wan­der­ing Monks) and wan­der­ing fri­ars brought the­ol­ogy and pas­toral sup­port to neglected areas, trav­el­ing min­strels prac­ticed the never-end­ing tour, and armies ranged far and wide in var­i­ous cru­sades and in sundry other wars. Pil­grim­ages were com­mon in both the Euro­pean and Islamic worlds and involved streams of trav­el­ers both locally (Can­ter­bury Tales-style) and internationally.

In the late 16th cen­tury it became fash­ion­able for young Euro­pean aris­to­crats and wealthy upper-class men to travel to sig­nif­i­cant Euro­pean cities as part of their edu­ca­tion in the arts and lit­er­a­ture. This was known as the Grand Tour, it included cities such as Lon­don, Paris, Venice, Flo­rence, and Rome. How­ever, The French rev­o­lu­tion brought with it the end of the Grand Tour.

Travel by water often pro­vided more com­fort and speed than land-travel, at least until the advent of a net­work of rail­ways in the 19th cen­tury. Travel for the pur­pose of tourism is reported to have started around this time when peo­ple began to travel for fun as travel was no longer a hard and chal­leng­ing task. This was cap­i­tal­ized on by peo­ple like Thomas Cook sell­ing tourism pack­ages where trains and hotels were booked together. Air­ships and air­planes took over much of the role of long-dis­tance sur­face travel in the 20th cen­tury, notably after the Sec­ond World War where there was a sur­plus of both air­craft and pilots. Indeed, air travel has become so ubiq­ui­tous in the 21st cen­tury that one woman, Alexis Alford, vis­ited all 196 coun­tries before the age of 21.