Jeri Clausing
With many travelers expected to remain close to home this year, the Dude Ranchers’ Association (DRA) has revamped its website to make it easy for travel advisors and consumers to find pandemic-era luxury in the great outdoors.
While the site does not have a travel advisor portal, the group’s public relations representative, David Wiggins of Widness & Wiggins PR, said most if not all of the member ranches work with travel agents and pay commissions. A page on the site speaks directly to the trade.
“This new website from the association is an excellent resource for agents and travel counselors to find the right ranch for their clients and make bookings directly with the ranch,” he said.
On the revamped site, advisors and consumers can learn about dude ranch vacations, then narrow down choices on its Find a Ranch Page. Still have questions? An interactive chat connects visitors to live dude ranch representatives. And there is information about how to choose the right ranch, what to pack, travel insurance and more.
The new site was eight months in the making, said Bryce Albright, executive director of the (DRA).
“We are so excited to see this new website go live. We hope our visitors enjoy browsing through it as much as we enjoyed building it,” she said.
Albright said nearly 500,000 unique visitors annually access the website. And she expects traffic to grow as people “are twitching to travel domestically and get out into nature — if only they knew where to go.”
“Now they can find their way quickly to our ranches,” she said.
Correction: The name of the organization is the Dude Ranchers’ Association; an incorrect name appeared in a previous version of this article.