yes directory submission is really helpful but you need submit your site to quality directory's, link exchange, social bookmarking and article submission are good way to promote a site.
Do you really think social bookmarking is a good way.according to me social bookmarking is useless, its much better to do work on social networking sites.
The diretory submission is definitely helpful to increase keyword rank on Google; and also many high-quality and related backlinks are do more help.
in travel sites you have to face with big competitors. so to get instant traffic you need to write some useful or interesting stuff which people like to read and which really contributes useful stuff to people in good manner . This content may be articles, videos or any thing and share this content to social bookmarking sites after uploading to specific place .
For diverting huge traffic on your site you have to move for SMO twitter will help you for thing thing.
Quality content, you should have a focused content. offer original and quality content services to your visitors. unique information, links, advertising, social media and blog may helpful for getting traffic.
In my opinion you should do the following things, some smart ways and you would be able to move the targeted traffic on your site. Here are some smart ways to get traffic and quality back links (for increasing your keywords ranking in SERPs) - 1. Press Release Submission and Distribution 2. Article Submission and Distribution 3. Social Bookmarking 4. Social Networking 5. Forum Posting 6. Micro Blogging 7. Blog Posting 8. Blog Commenting 9. Classified Ad posting 10. Craigslist 11. Free posting on Advertising Forums etc. 12. And you can also go for the traditional way like as 1. Link Exchange with other theme base sites an 2. Directory Submission 13. Submit your site on the video posting site like as youtube and much more 14. Make a perfect squidoo lens for your site, work on that and move traffic to your site with some interesting videos displaying there. You may apply google adsense on your site to make money, the more visitors you would get, there is a chance to get more hits on your ads. You should work on these fields and you would get the desired results.
You could increase your website's page rank through the following methods as: 1)Offer quality,original,free content on your website 2)To get more backlinks would help to increase traffic 3)By improving Search Engine ranking by focusing your content on keywords related to your topic 4)Link Exchange 5)By Advertising your presence