The Great Northern Catskills
A destination website that adapts to each visitor
A destination website that adapts to each visitor
Greatnortherncatskills.com is the official tourism website for Greene County, New York. We rebuilt it and relaunched it in 2026 as a personalization-first destination platform, one that changes what it shows based on how each visitor uses it: what they tap, what they search, what they ask, and the time of year. Two visitors planning different trips don’t see the same pages.
Traditional tourism sites ask visitors to sort themselves into a menu before they’ve even landed: hiking, dining, events, some combination of all three. That taxonomy creates friction: visitors can’t always find exactly what they’re looking for, and browsers don’t convert into bookers when the site makes them hunt.
We built greatnortherncatskills.com to remove that friction. Returning visitors continue their planning where they stopped.
Fall Colors Await
A tapestry of amber, crimson, and gold across the mountains
- Romantic weekend getaway
- Family adventure with kids
- Hiking and outdoor activities
- Culinary Experiences
- Peaceful Retreats
How it works
- An adaptive homepage.
- The homepage reorders itself around each visitor's taps, searches, and the season.
- Conversation-first planning.
- Visitors can describe what they're after in plain language, or tap a well-crafted helper prompt, say, a quiet weekend with some hiking, but a wife who "isn't very outdoorsy." An intelligence layer reads that intent in real time: relaxation, light outdoor activity, a couple, a weekend trip, and the page reshapes around it: hero imagery, content recommendations, and calls-to-action all adjust to match, surfacing beginner-friendly trails and romantic cabin stays instead of expert backcountry routes. Traditional navigation stays fully available for visitors who'd rather browse than talk, neither path is a fallback.
- One version of content.
- Editors write a page once. The CMS shows the right version to families, hikers, foodies, and returning visitors.
- An AI trip planner.
- Visitors ask questions in plain language and get an itinerary built from the site's hotel, restaurant, and trail listings.
- Seasonal content.
- A live Foliage Meter and four-season content keep the destination selling all year, not just peak weekends.
What it means for visitors
- Planning continues.
- Visitors start itineraries instead of leaving the site.
- Returning visitors.
- The site holds the trip already being planned.
- Seasonal content.
- The site leads with what's in season, not one fixed homepage.
- Faster, more relevant browsing.
- Conversation surfaces context, who's traveling, what they actually want, that clicking through categories never could, so visitors see relevant content faster and bounce less.
- No extra headcount.
- One editor covers every audience.
- A genuinely novel experience.
- Among destination sites still built on menu-first navigation, this is real competitive differentiation.
The site and its documents meet WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards.