This was a project of mine on my own server. We had a very large map and I wanted some way to speed travel (with a cost of course). This was what I came up with.

There is a large underground shrine near spawn. One would go in, drop an item on the shrine altar, pay 5 levels of experience then touch (press a button) on one of the 8 pillars to be ported to the corresponding shrine.

I was really happy with the end result. I might even make a tutorial on it (video tutorial?) if people want to make something similar.

P.S. The last picture is quite a ways before the completion of the project. You can watch the video to see it when it is fully complete. And yes I know of the little gimmicks in the video, it was my first one and I did it in a very short time slot. I promise the next one will be far better.