28th May 2026
Roughly a 10 minute read by
Travel is one of the most demanding sectors to market in, and not just because of the competition. Demand shifts overnight. Pricing changes can halve conversion rates without a single campaign variable moving. A news cycle, a weather event or a viral social moment can spike or sink destination interest in days.
Performance problems in travel are rarely isolated to channels. They’re almost always the result of misalignment - between demand and digital activity, between pricing and conversion expectation, between what the market is doing and what the strategy is set up to respond to.
The brands that outperform aren’t always the most sophisticated marketers. They’re the one who move fastest when conditions change.
Before getting into channels and tactics, it's worth being clear about the fundamentals, because they're the things that get overlooked when strategies become very complex.
Performance in travel comes down to four things, and none of them are glamorous, which is probably why they get skipped.
1. Focusing on real demand: prioritising destinations and queries that are actively converting, not just generating traffic.
2. Reacting to market conditions: adjusting budgets, messaging and priorities based on pricing, availability and competition as they shift.
3. Aligning marketing with commercial reality: ensuring campaigns reflect margins, inventory and actual business goals rather than vanity metrics.
4. Turning traffic into genuine engagement: using activations and digital experiences to communicate value clearly and capture that all-important first-party data.
The biggest performance gains we see in travel rarely come from small channel optimisations. They come from better decisions about where to focus and when to act.
For Jet2holidays, visibility was never the problem. In one of the most competitive travel markets in the UK, they had the brand presence and media weight to be seen. The challenge was deeper than that.
In a market where every operator is pushing deals, discounts and dream destinations simultaneously, how do you create something that users actually want to spend time with? Something they remember when it comes to booking?
Our answer was gamification. A series of large-scale digital activations built around key seasonal moments, each designed with a simple brief: make it fast, frictionless and genuinely worth playing. Ideally, worth playing repeatedly.
Across the campaign series, the results were significant: over 26 million plays – that’s not a typo – averaging 95 plays per user in some executions, with first-party data capture running throughout. More than that, the campaigns created something that pure channel activity rarely does – a reason to choose Jet2 that had nothing to do with price. Read the .
Three things define the travel digital landscape right now, and all three shape how strategy needs to work.
Demand is volatile. We've seen destination interest drop by double digits week-on-week purely due to pricing shifts, with no change in campaign structure or visibility. Declining traffic in those moments isn't a marketing failure. It's a market signal. Knowing the difference quickly is one of the most valuable things a travel marketing team can do.
Search behaviour has fragmented. People compare across multiple sessions, switch between devices and consult reviews before committing. The conversion path is longer than it used to be, which means capturing initial intent is only half the job. Supporting users through the full decision – through remarketing, CRM, content and brand recall – is where bookings are actually won.
Travel is inherently comparison-driven. A strong ranking or high impression share doesn't protect you if your proposition is weaker than the next result. Digital brings users into consideration. The strength of the offer determines whether they convert.
Search results in travel aren't just a list of links anymore. They're packed with price comparisons, maps, reviews, AI-generated summaries and booking widgets, all competing for attention before a user has clicked on anything.
When users do land on your site, they arrive with high expectations, limited patience and often several tabs already open. Value has to be obvious immediately. Confidence needs to be established within seconds. Any hesitation is an invitation to go back and try the next result.
This is the attention economy in its most unforgiving form. Visibility gets you into consideration. Execution is what gets you booked.
One of the most useful frameworks for diagnosing travel performance is what we refer to as the Demand Alignment Model – the relationship between three things that need to be in sync for a strategy to work.
Performance problems typically occur when one of these three is out of step with the others. Paid media amplifying a product with weak pricing. SEO driving traffic to destinations with no availability. CRM working with insufficient data to do anything meaningful. We've seen all three. Sometimes simultaneously. When the model is aligned, each element makes the others more effective. When it isn't, the whole strategy leaks.
These are the most immediate performance levers in travel, and the most commonly underestimated. A few things worth knowing:
Pricing is probably the single biggest driver of conversion rate in travel. A 5-10% pricing gap relative to competitors is often enough to significantly reduce conversion, even with strong visibility.
Margins determine how aggressively a brand can compete. Higher-margin products support broader targeting and more competitive bidding. Lower-margin offerings require tighter focus on high-intent queries and proven destinations.
Availability is the most immediate lever of all. There's limited value in driving traffic to destinations or experiences that are sold out or nearly so, yet campaigns routinely continue to push these areas because structures haven't been updated to reflect live inventory. Aligning activity with real-time availability data is one of the faster wins available to most travel brands. It's also one of the most satisfying – because the results tend to show up quickly.
The travel industry has always run on seasonal rhythms – but treating seasonality as a fixed calendar is one of the more reliable ways to underperform.
Demand shifts based on pricing and competitor behaviour, not just the time of year. Booking windows vary. External factors – weather events, news cycles, trending destinations – can create or destroy demand rapidly. What works better than a fixed plan is a genuinely responsive approach: monitoring signals in real time, adjusting budgets and messaging as conditions change, and redirecting effort quickly when the data warrants it.
Seasonality should inform the starting point for strategy, not fix it in place. Think of it as a compass, not a map.
No channel in travel works well in isolation. Each plays a distinct role in a connected system – and performance suffers when they're managed independently.
The failure mode isn't usually a single weak channel. It's misalignment. Paid amplifying weak pricing. SEO bringing traffic to poor offers. CRM with nothing to work with because there's no activation strategy generating data. These aren't channel problems – they're strategic alignment problems, and they're the ones worth solving first. The good news is that when you fix the alignment, you often don't need to spend more. You just need to spend better
In a sector where most brands are competing on largely similar propositions – price, destination, inclusions – the ability to create genuine engagement beyond those comparisons is a meaningful differentiator.
Activations do that job. Gamified experiences, quizzes, reward mechanics and interactive content give users a reason to spend time with a brand rather than simply passing through it - driving dwell time, encouraging return visits and generating first-party data that makes CRM and remarketing significantly more effective.
This is also the part of travel marketing that can't be automated. Real engagement – the kind that influences a booking decision – takes creativity, craft and a genuine understanding of what makes people tick. That's what we bring to it.
Our Jet2holidays work is a clear example of what's possible at scale. But the principle applies at every level: activations turn passive traffic into active engagement, and active engagement influences booking decisions in ways that a well-targeted ad simply can't.
The most common performance issues we see in travel are the ones that are easiest to miss - because surface metrics look fine. Traffic holds steady. Impressions are strong. But revenue doesn't scale.
The underlying causes tend to follow a familiar pattern:
Addressing these usually delivers more impact than any incremental channel improvement. They're structural issues – and they respond to structural thinking as part of a broader, bells-and-whistles digital marketing strategy.
A few patterns come up repeatedly across travel brands, and they're worth naming because they're so common:.
The solution in most cases isn't more complexity. It's more clarity about where effort is actually worth applying. Less doing. More thinking. Then better doing.
Digital marketing in travel is less about mastering individual channels and more about understanding how those channels interact with the real-world factors that actually drive performance – demand, pricing, availability and timing.
The biggest gains rarely come from better campaigns in isolation. They come from better decisions: about where to focus, when to act and how to align digital activity with what's genuinely happening in the market rather than what happened last quarter.
The brands that succeed here aren't necessarily the most sophisticated marketers. They're the ones that stay closest to the fundamentals, move quickly when conditions change and treat commercial reality as part of the strategy rather than a constraint on it. We've built our travel marketing practice around exactly that thinking – and we'd love to bring it to yours.
We work with travel brands to build digital strategies that stay close to demand, align with commercial reality and create genuine engagement at scale. If you'd like to explore what that could look like for your business, we'd love to hear from you.
Search – both organic and paid – is typically the primary driver of high-intent traffic for most travel brands.. The strongest results come when all channels are working in a connected strategy rather than independently.
Most often because of a mismatch between what users expect and what they find – whether that's a landing page that doesn't reflect their search intent, pricing that isn't competitive or availability that doesn't match what was advertised.
With flexibility rather than fixed planning. Monitor demand signals regularly, adjust budgets based on real performance and stay willing to redirect effort when conditions change.
Both, used well together. SEO builds long-term visibility. PPC responds to immediate intent and provides flexibility to scale quickly. Prioritising one at the expense of the other tends to limit overall performance.
Better alignment between digital activity and commercial reality – specifically pricing, margins and availability. When campaigns are built around what's actually worth promoting at any given moment, performance tends to improve significantly.
By starting with the offer rather than the channel. Clearer messaging, stronger landing pages and upfront communication of value, pricing and availability all make a meaningful difference.
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