Working on travel brands is one of the better parts of this job, the obvious downside being the constant low-grade FOMO of watching other people explore the world from behind a desk. We've run it across different regions, business models and scales, for long enough to see which things consistently work.
The operators that grow aren't doing anything especially clever. They do the fundamentals properly across several channels and stick with it long enough to compound, and almost always the underlying product is good - people come back from the trip and tell their friends it was worth the money. That matters more than anything marketing can do. Marketing accelerates a good travel product and can't rescue a weak one.
Travel looks like ecommerce and behaves nothing like it
There are products, prices and a checkout, so the instinct is to treat it like any other online store: drive traffic, show options, convert.
The behaviour underneath is completely different. Nobody wakes up and books a trip. They start somewhere loose - flights to Thailand, hotels in Sydney, best places to go in July - then click around, compare, send links to whoever they're travelling with, leave, and come back days or weeks later.
That gap between first interaction and booking is where most of the marketing actually happens, and it's the part most measurement setups can't see.
What search actually measures
Search still matters enormously. When someone types "group tours Vietnam" or "best Thailand tour company" you want to be there, because the intent is about as high as it gets.
But a lot of those searches were caused by something earlier - something they saw, something they heard, something a friend posted. By the time the query happens the decision is largely made, and search gets the credit for work that happened elsewhere. Search is where the decision surfaces rather than where it forms, which has consequences for how you attribute any of it.
The channels only work stacked
This is where most travel setups fall down: channels get split out and measured in isolation, search over here, social over there, email running quietly in the background.
Performance doesn't come from any one of them. It comes from how they stack:
- Search captures demand at the point it exists
- Paid social keeps you visible while people are still deciding
- Video builds familiarity before intent is obvious enough to target
- Display extends reach
- Email brings people back when the timing finally lines up
Take one out and something else has to work harder to cover it, usually at a worse rate.
Paid social suffers most from being judged in isolation, because it gets held to direct conversion when its actual job in travel is staying visible during the in-between phase. The category helps - you have content people genuinely want to look at, which is not true of most industries. Someone sees a place, scrolls past, sees it again a fortnight later, and eventually starts looking properly. That familiarity is doing real work even when the attribution says otherwise.
Attention is easy here. Booking is the hard part
Travel generates attention almost too easily. Good visuals, strong engagement, cheap clicks - and then the conversion rate disappoints everyone.
A lot of travel sites still behave like brochures. They look expensive and they don't answer what people actually want to know: what's included, what the trip looks like day to day, who it's for, and what it's really like when you're there. Most of the drop-off happens at exactly that point, which makes it a landing page and content problem rather than a traffic one.
Reviews do more work here than most campaigns. People trust other travellers over brands, and a strong review answers the only question that matters - did this work for someone like me. They also lift everything around them: search click-through, landing page performance, and general willingness to trust the brand at all.
The organic layer people underrate
SEO quietly does a lot of the heavy lifting in travel, because the searches are specific and high intent - destination queries, comparisons, timing questions, practical detail. Pages built properly pick up traffic over time and that traffic converts, which gives you a base layer you aren't paying for on every click.
Reddit has been creeping into the decision process for a while now. More travel searches surface Reddit threads, people trust them and read them properly, and questions like "is this tour worth it" get answered by strangers with no incentive to lie. It isn't polished, which is the point. With AI systems pulling heavily from that kind of content it's showing up more often, so it shapes perception whether or not you're actively running anything there.
Email is the other underrated one. People rarely book on a first visit, and email is what reconnects the browse to the booking - reminders, offers, and above all timing.
Seasonality is the biggest lever and the biggest trap
Travel demand isn't steady. January is strong, and Black Friday and Cyber Monday are now bigger still.
They've also become crowded. What used to be a short window is now weeks of discounting, with everyone pushing and everyone extending, and the result is higher costs, more competition, squeezed margins and customers who learn to wait for the sale. That produces a cycle of strong peaks and noticeably weaker periods in between.
Better operators still use those moments, because they work. They just don't depend on them - staying visible outside sale periods, building demand before people are ready to buy, and refusing to train their customers to only ever buy at a discount. It's less dramatic and considerably more stable.
What it comes down to
None of this is complicated, and all of it takes consistency. Multiple channels doing different jobs, the brand visible before anyone searches, trust built through experiences that were actually good, and everything measured against bookings rather than activity.
If the product is good and the experience delivers, marketing has something real to amplify. If it doesn't, marketing mostly just accelerates how quickly people find out.
