The brand.
How to use it.

How to use this document

You do not need a design background to use this. You need to know which button to click. Most of what follows comes down to three things: who you are writing for, which logo belongs on the page and whether the words sound like TravelDesk. Everything else is detail you can look up as you need it.

This document is written in British English because it is maintained from the London studio. The materials it governs are written in the language of their market, which is covered in language and markets.

Who TravelDesk is

No one knows today's traveller like TravelDesk.

As a global trade desk for programmatic advertising, we specialise in the travel, tourism and hospitality industry. Using proprietary data, high-quality inventory and travel-focused expertise, we connect your brand with travellers everywhere. Built on the industry's leading travel research and data, we know exactly how to reach them with your messaging.

What we do

Your success is our top priority. We develop multi- and omnichannel solutions to your marketing needs. Built around a curated programmatic marketplace, our data- and AI-powered platform harnesses the power of machine learning to target qualified audiences at scale.

Our mission

We believe that travel is more than just a way to break free from your daily routine. Travel opens our eyes to other cultures' perspectives and ways of life. It inspires creativity and creates possibilities.

Our mission at TravelDesk is to empower our clients in the travel, tourism and hospitality industry to help people discover and explore new places – or experience familiar places in a new way.

Where we sit

TravelDesk is powered by MMGY Global, the world's leading travel marketing company. That relationship appears in two specific places: the endorsement line on MMGY-built products, and the 20+ years of proprietary travel research behind our audience work. It does not appear as a logo lockup on general TravelDesk materials. The one exception: documents built on an MMGY-powered product – a TRiPs or EurekA! profile, for instance – carry a small MMGY mark alongside the TravelDesk wordmark in the footer, since the underlying data and research is MMGY's. Everything else stays TravelDesk-only.

Our signature look

Two devices make a page recognisably TravelDesk before anyone reads a word of it. Get these right and the work already looks like us.

1. The TravelDesk corner

A single large corner radius on the top right. Every other corner stays square. It appears on the page frame, on hero images, on content panels and on the rail. It is the most recognisable thing we own after the wordmark.

2. The background choice

Two modes. The choice is not taste, it is a decision about how the piece will be consumed.

Brand voice

Four pillars. They apply in every language and every market. Spelling changes between markets, the voice does not.

The four tests

Words to avoid

These appear in weak drafts and almost never survive an edit: leveraging, empowering, holistic, bespoke, cutting-edge, seamless, game-changing, impactful, best-in-class, unlock, elevate, robust, synergy, in today's landscape, at the end of the day. If one of them is genuinely doing work in a sentence, keep it. Usually it is not.

Copy rules

These apply to everything written in TravelDesk's name: credentials deck, website, case studies, emails, proposals, social and any internal document that could be shared externally.

Rewrites: before and after

The rules above are easier to apply once you have seen them applied. These are nine situations that come up constantly, with the version that usually gets written first and the version that should go out. Nothing here needs a writing background. It is mostly about cutting the warm-up and putting the number first.

A full example: what good looks like end to end

The nine rewrites above are single lines. This is a real result, written the way the voice rules above actually sound in a finished piece – confident, specific, numbers doing the talking.

Notice what it does not do: no "we are thrilled to share outstanding results", no adjectives standing in for evidence. The numbers are the pitch.

Language and markets

Every piece is written in the language of the geography it is going to. TravelDesk is an American company, so American English is the default for anything without a defined regional audience. EMEA work is British English. DACH work is German. Never mix conventions inside one document.

Spelling and vocabulary

Currency

Performance figures keep the currency they were actually measured in, and the market of the campaign is always stated alongside. What changes by market is the currency named in generic phrasing about return.

• US: "return on every dollar invested"
• EMEA and UK: "return on every pound invested"
• DACH: "je investiertem Euro"

A campaign that delivered $1.44M in attributed hotel revenue is reported as $1.44M in all three markets. Do not convert results. Label the market and the period instead: US Destination · Jan-Mar 2026.

Building the three versions

These are not translations of each other. The spelling differs, and so does the content, because the products and inventory available in each market are not the same.

• Keep one master layout per format. The design is identical across all three markets, so only content layers change.
• Name files with the market suffix: 1 Pager A4 - DMO - v4 - EMEA, - DE, - US.
• Build the EMEA version first, since that is where the existing content lives, then fork rather than translate.
• Mark any capability that is market-specific in the master file, so nobody carries it across by accident.

Our core sentences

These lines carry the brand across most of what we produce. They are fixed. Do not rewrite them for a specific piece, and do not translate them fresh each time.

Setting the tagline

Three stacked lines, all uppercase, with alternating weight: ExtraBold, Light, ExtraBold. The lines do not stack flush. Each one steps further right than the one above, so the block descends diagonally from the bottom-left of the wordmark to its bottom-right. Line one starts at the wordmark's left edge, line three finishes at its right edge.

Correct

Connecting you

with today's

Travellers

The cascade. Line one sits under the wordmark's left edge, line three finishes at its right edge, and the Light line bridges the two.

Wrong

Connecting you

with today's

Travellers

Centred, flush and all one weight. It reads as a caption rather than a lockup, and it is what happens when the line is retyped instead of placed.

The TravelDesk capabilities

Logo system

The TravelDesk wordmark is a single typographic asset. "Travel" and "Desk" are set in different colours, and which colour goes where depends on the background. There is also a "TD" monogram for small and square formats. Always take the file from the shared drive. Never rebuild the wordmark by typing it.

Primary on dark. White "Travel", Coral Green "Desk". The default for decks, one-pagers, reports and anything on a dark background.

Primary on light. Charcoal Navy "Travel", Coral Green "Desk". The default for Word documents, letterheads, print and any light-background application.

Full variant set

Nine wordmark variants exist. Nothing outside this set is approved, and new colour combinations are not created locally.

White + Coral Green

Default on dark. Decks, reports, one-pagers, navigation, digital headers.

White + Strawberry

Event and campaign formats where Strawberry is the lead accent. Posters, stand graphics, out-of-home.

All white

Over photography, over busy backgrounds and any dark background that is not Charcoal Navy. The safest dark-background choice.

All Coral Green

Single-colour on dark where the wordmark is a supporting element rather than the focus.

All Strawberry

Hero lockups on Charcoal Navy, deck covers and LinkedIn banners where the wordmark is the largest element. Also the safest choice for email, because it holds up on both light and dark.

Charcoal + Coral Green

Default on light. Word documents, proposals, print, letterhead.

Charcoal + Strawberry

Light-background equivalent of the event lockup, for pages where Strawberry is the lead accent.

All Charcoal Navy

Single-colour reproduction. Black-and-white print, embossing, watermarks, partner documents with a fixed one-colour rule.

All Pine Green

Light Aqua and Sand backgrounds where Charcoal Navy would be too heavy.

The TD monogram

For formats too small or too square for the wordmark: social avatars, favicons, app tiles, watermarks. It never replaces the wordmark in a document header.

Charcoal + Coral Green

Default monogram on light backgrounds.

Charcoal + Strawberry

Where Strawberry is the lead accent on the surrounding page.

All Charcoal Navy

Single-colour use, stamps, embossing and small print.

Clear space and minimum size

Practical rule for everyday use: never place the logo smaller than it needs to be to read clearly, and always give it breathing room. The exact numbers below are for whoever is producing a print run or a tightly-sized layout – most people will never need them.

What to do, and what not to do

Product lockups

Five named products appear across our materials. Two are ours, two come from MMGY Global, and one is the TravelDesk activation offer itself. Getting the endorsement line right matters commercially, so it is worth checking rather than guessing.

TravelDesk VISTA

The VISTA lockup keeps the TravelDesk wordmark and adds two symbolic elements: a location pin for precision and focus, and a compass inside it for navigation and strategic direction. The product name sits in a rounded badge to its right. It is a sub-brand of TravelDesk, not a separate brand, so it inherits every rule in this document.

On light. Charcoal Navy wordmark, Coral Green pin, Charcoal Navy badge with white VISTA.

On dark. White wordmark, Coral Green pin, white badge with Charcoal Navy VISTA.

TravelDesk and MMGY together

Documents built on an MMGY-powered product, a TRiPs or EurekA! profile for instance, carry both marks in the footer. Everything else stays TravelDesk only. The two never merge into a single logo, and the MMGY mark never appears on a cover or in a header.

Colour

Charcoal Navy carries most of the page. Coral Green is the signal colour, the thing that catches the eye. Strawberry is for emphasis, never for large areas. Click any swatch to copy the hex value.

The palette

Ten colours. Charcoal Navy and Navy Surface build the dark page and white builds the light one. Pine Green and Slate carry structure and secondary text. Coral Green signals, Strawberry emphasises, Amber highlights, Harbour separates data. Lime, Sand and Light Aqua are tints and occasional accents, not page grounds.

How much of each

Which colours go together

Every combination below is approved. Anything not shown here has not been tested and probably does not work.

Putting them together

Four combinations that cover almost everything we make. The bar under each shows roughly how much of the page each colour should occupy, which is the part people usually get wrong.

Colour codes, for every tool

The hex codes on the swatches above are what designers use. Word, PowerPoint and Excel mostly ask for a different format, so here is every colour in every format you will actually be asked for.

Use RGB on screen (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Keynote, Figma). Use CMYK only when a printer specifically asks for it – the CMYK figures above are a good starting point but a proof from the actual printer is what settles it, since every press converts colour slightly differently.

Getting these colours into Word, PowerPoint and Excel

Typing a hex code correctly every time is where small colour mistakes creep in. There are two ways to make this close to foolproof, and it is worth doing once rather than retyping codes on every document.

This one file covers our six most-used colours – Coral Green, Strawberry, Amber, Light Aqua, Slate and Lime – plus Charcoal Navy, Pine Green, Sand and white. Navy Surface and Harbour are not part of it, because Office only allows twelve colour slots per set and those two are used less often. Use the table above for those two.

The manual way, if you would rather not install a file

1. Go to Design → Variants → Colors → Customize Colors in PowerPoint or Word (in Excel, Page Layout → Colors → Customize Colors).
2. You will see boxes labelled Text/Background and Accent 1 to 6. Click each one and choose More Colors, then the Custom tab, and type in the RGB numbers from the table above rather than the hex code (the RGB boxes are usually easier to get right first time).
3. Name the set "TravelDesk" and save it.
4. It will now appear in that colour picker every time, in that application, on that computer.

The difference between the two methods: the downloaded file sets everything up in one step and works the same way in Word, PowerPoint and Excel. The manual method takes a few minutes but needs no download, and has to be repeated once per application.

Gradients

Three families. The accent rules always fade into whatever background they sit on.

Colour do and do not

Contrast and accessibility

• White text on Charcoal Navy, Navy Surface, Pine Green and Slate all pass comfortably at body sizes.
• Coral Green and Lime are light colours. Use them on dark backgrounds, or as large display type on light. Never as small body text on white.
• Strawberry on white passes for large text and display sizes but is tight for small body text. Keep it for headings, emphasis and accents.
• Never rely on colour alone to carry meaning. If a chart uses two accents to separate series, label both directly.
• Text over photography always needs a scrim. Judging contrast by eye on your own screen is not a check.

Data and charts

Reporting is where the palette gets stretched furthest and where default software styling does the most damage. These are the five treatments we use. Anything else needs to come through the studio first.

1. KPI cards

The headline numbers at the top of a report. Each card carries its icon in a Coral Green circle, the label in tracked uppercase and the figure in ExtraBold. Four or eight per row, never five or seven. On a dark page the cards are white; on a white page they are Navy Surface, so they always separate from the ground behind them.

On a dark page: white cards.

On a white page: Navy Surface cards. Same construction, inverted.

2. Bar comparison

The default for comparing a handful of things. Coral Green on the series that matters, Slate on the context, Amber on the one bar you are pointing at. Bars carry the TravelDesk corner. Values sit outside the bar, never inside it.

3. Share of total

A donut, never a pie and never more than five segments. The centre carries the total, which is the number people actually want. Order segments largest to smallest, clockwise from the top.

4. Data tables

Long tables sit on white, not on the dark page, because they are read rather than presented. No vertical rules, no heavy borders. One highlighted row at most, tinted rather than outlined.

5. Insight panels

The written interpretation that sits beside the numbers. A tinted panel with the icon in its circle, a tracked uppercase heading and arrow bullets. This is the part clients actually read, so it gets as much care as the chart.

Chart do and do not

Typography

TravelDesk uses a single typeface. Plus Jakarta Sans sets everything: hero display, headlines, body, data callouts, labels and interface. There is no secondary or accent font. Hierarchy comes from weight, size and colour, never from a change of typeface.

Weights and where they go

Medium 500 and Bold 700 exist in the family but are not part of the system. Using them makes hierarchy muddy, because the gap between 600 and 800 is what carries the structure.

Type do and do not

Getting the font to work

Plus Jakarta Sans is free through Google Fonts under the SIL Open Font Licence, which permits commercial use, modification and embedding. It is not a system font, so it has to be installed or embedded before it will render.

The font is called Plus Jakarta Sans, in that word order. Searching for "Jakarta Plus Sans" will not find it.

The display headline

This is the device that makes a TravelDesk slide recognisable from across a room, and the one most often rebuilt wrongly. It is not just big bold type. It is a specific alternation of weights across stacked uppercase lines, with exactly one line carrying an accent colour.

The same rhythm in eyebrows and rails

The alternation carries down into small tracked uppercase labels. The eyebrow above a slide headline reads WHAT WE DO, and the descriptor on the side rail reads TRAVEL PROGRAMMATIC ADVERTISING EXPERTS. Same idea, smaller scale. It is why the German descriptor is set EXPERTEN FÜR PROGRAMMATISCHE REISEWERBUNG.

The rail

A narrow strip carrying the descriptor, the gradient rule and the wordmark. It is what makes a single slide identifiable when it is screenshotted out of context. Which orientation it takes depends entirely on the shape of the page.

Vertical, on landscape decks

Horizontal, on portrait pieces

Where a portrait format wants the same signature without fighting the page shape, the rail turns 90 degrees and runs along the bottom edge instead of the right edge. Same three elements, same order, read left to right this time rather than bottom to top.

The bottom-rail variant. Descriptor and wordmark swap ends compared with the vertical version, so the wordmark still sits nearest the corner.

Icons

One icon set, in a single duotone style, in Coral Green, sitting inside a thin circle of the same colour. It is the complete approved set today, and it will grow as new icons are needed. Do not mix in icons from anywhere else.

A sample of the set, not all of it – the library runs to over a hundred icons and keeps growing. The label is what the icon means to us; the name underneath is the filename, so you can find it in the library.

How to use them

Icon do and do not

Bullet markers

Lists use a right-arrow rather than a dot or an icon. It is a solid arrow, not a typed character, so it holds its weight at small sizes. Pine Green on light, Coral Green on dark.

• Hotel and flight search and booking data
• Seasonality and travel planning windows
• Length of stay and share of wallet against a competitor set
• Origin and destination markets

Example 01 · Good versus bad

One example of the rules above applied side by side. It only makes sense once you have read the sections before it – this is not a new rule, it is what following the existing ones actually looks like.

Neither of these is anyone's work, both are made up to show the point. The one on the left is not badly made. It is four small decisions taken independently, and that is all it takes.

Four decisions, taken independently

TravelDesk

Reaching Today's Travellers

A Complete End-To-End Solution For Your Brand

43%

Metric label here

2.1x

Metric label here

88%

Metric label here

In order to leverage our holistic, cutting-edge approach we facilitate seamless outcomes for stakeholders across the entire travel journey.

Wrong navy · Arial · three unrelated accent colours · stretched wordmark · the exact words this page tells you to avoid.

The same content, on the rules

Reaching today's travellers

Where demand is coming from, and where the budget should go.

43%

Metric label

2.1x

Metric label

88%

Metric label

We show where demand is coming from, plan against it, and measure what it returned.

Charcoal Navy · Plus Jakarta Sans · one accent · wordmark untouched · numbers doing the talking, no filler words.

Consistency is what lets a client trust us before they have read a word, because the container already looks considered.

The world map pattern

A line-hatched world map, used as a low-contrast texture on otherwise empty dark surfaces. It says "global" without anyone having to write the word.

The pattern behind the wordmark, as it appears on LinkedIn banners and virtual backgrounds.

Imagery

Our photography is about people travelling, not about products or technology. We sell reach into a human moment, so the picture has to be a human moment. Travellers, families, action, happiness, sun. Destination landscape is used, but as a setting rather than as the subject on its own.

What we choose

The library, and why it works

Ten frames from the approved set. None of them is a photograph of a destination. Every one is a photograph of a person having a moment in a destination, which is the distinction the whole imagery standard rests on. Solo, couples, families, groups and every season, not just the warm-weather default.

Imagery do and do not

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is where most people first meet TravelDesk. The brand voice applies exactly as it does everywhere else, with one addition: the first line of a post is the whole post, because everything after it is hidden behind "see more".

What a good post looks like

TravelDesk

4,182 followers · 2d

Most destination campaigns can tell you how many people saw the ad.

Very few can tell you how many of them booked a hotel room.

We ran a US destination campaign from January to March and connected the media spend directly to arrivals data. $1.44M in hotel revenue attributed, at 6.83x return on investment.

The difference is not better targeting. It is measurement that reaches past the click and into the booking.

What is the hardest thing to prove in your own reporting right now?

#ProgrammaticAdvertising #TravelMarketing #DestinationMarketing

$1.44M

Hotel revenue attributed
US Destination · Jan-Mar 2026

142 reactions · 18 comments

The hook carries the tension. The body gives one number with its market and period. The graphic carries a single figure, the gradient rule, the corner and the wordmark. Nothing else.

A post built around an image

Where the post carries a photograph rather than a data frame, the image still has to be branded – the corner, a scrim and the wordmark, not a bare stock photo with a caption.

TravelDesk

4,182 followers · 5d

City breaks are booking six weeks earlier than they did in 2024.

Which means the campaigns still launching in October are arriving after the decision has been made.

We moved a European destination client to a September start this year. Same budget, same creative, 2.1x the bookings.

#TravelMarketing #DestinationMarketing #ProgrammaticAdvertising

Book the trip

Before they decide

218 reactions · 31 comments

How a post is built

What we post about

• Campaign results, with the number in the first line.
• Something we learned that the reader can use, whether or not they ever become a client. This is the "helpful" pillar doing its job.
• Industry shifts explained plainly, with our position stated rather than hinted at.
• The people and the work: TravelDesk, events, the team, what we actually made.

What we do not post: reshared articles with "Interesting read" on top, congratulation posts with no substance, or anything that could have come from any agency in the category.

Formats and sizes

Every format we produce, at the size it is actually built. Build at these dimensions rather than resizing something else, because scaling a deck slide into a social frame is where the corner radius and the type sizes stop being right.

Documents and decks

Social, email and video call

Templates and assets

Everything downloadable now lives on the assets tab, sorted by what it is: decks, one-pagers, reporting, logos, fonts, icons, patterns and imagery. It also carries instructions for using the Word and PowerPoint templates.

Start from a template rather than a file you found on the drive. Templates carry the correct fonts, colours, corner, gradient rule, market descriptor and logo variant already, which removes most of the ways a document goes wrong.

Before you send

Fourteen checks. They take about two minutes and catch almost everything that comes back from a review.

• Background. Dark if it stays on screen, light if it will be printed or read at length. The logo variant matches.
• Corner. Top right only on frames and panels. All four corners on collage photo tiles.
• Gradient rule. Fading into the background it sits on, not into another accent colour. One per section.
• Side rail. Present, reading bottom to top, with the descriptor in the right market language.
• Market. One spelling convention throughout, matching the audience. No "traveller" and "traveler" in the same document.
• Logo. Right variant, full clear space, not stretched, not retyped, not in a box.
• Font. Plus Jakarta Sans rendering everywhere, including footers and chart labels. If you see Calibri, the font did not embed.
• Weights. Only 300, 400, 600 and 800.
• Icons. From the library, in Coral Green, in their circles, all at the same optical size.
• Numbers. Every performance claim has a figure, with the market and the period named.
• Bold. No more than one or two bolded phrases per paragraph.
• Dashes. En dash with spaces, not em dashes and not hyphens.
• Headings. Sentence case in documents, uppercase display treatment on slides.
• Filler. Read the first sentence of each section. If it could describe any company in any industry, rewrite it.

Sign-off and contact

The Creative Studio holds Brand Guardian authority, which means final sign-off on anything carrying the TravelDesk name externally. That is not a bottleneck by design. It exists so that quality does not depend on who happened to build the file. For now, everything comes through the studio. As the wider team gets more familiar with the rules, department leads will take on their own brand guardianship too.

Questions, asset requests, template fixes and anything you are unsure about: studio@traveldeskglobal.com. Asking first is always faster than reworking afterwards.