travel marketing platform

The ultimate travel marketing strategy guide

Discover the ultimate travel marketing tactics to succeed and stay ahead.

The importance of getting your marketing right in the travel sector is at an all-time high. Social media and influencers have helped make the world more visible than ever before. Consumers are turning to social channels as a source of inspiration. They’re hunting for the next trending destination and best travel deals.

On top of this, there has been a much-needed post-COVID travel boom. So-called ‘revenge holidays’ are in full swing and worldwide tourist arrivals are expected to reach up to  95% of pre-pandemic levels . It finally looks like things are getting back to normal and opportunities are everywhere.

But competition is growing. Standing out from the crowd is becoming increasingly difficult and keeping travelers engaged enough to complete the checkout process is a challenge.

At the same time, there are question marks over how long this travel boom will last. Staffing issues, the cost of fuel and energy, and uncertainty around the cost of living are causing concern for travelers and travel marketers alike.

In this ultimate guide, we will have a look at the current state of the travel marketing landscape and break down all the channels and tactics you need to utilize to succeed in the highly competitive sectorwere

• Travel marketing strategy
• Email marketing for travel marketers  
• Segmentation strategies
• SMS marketing for travel brands
• Marketing automation programs

6. Web personalization for travel brands 7. Push notification marketing 8. Reporting and analytics  9. AI for travel marketing 10. Integrations for travel marketers

What is travel marketing and why is it important?

People are always dreaming of their next vacation, surely that means travel brands basically sell themselves, right?

Unfortunately, not. How brands market themselves is what makes travelers choose one resort and airline over another. Travel brands must promote and sell their products, services, and experiences to customers. You need to showcase the distinctive features of your destination, accommodation, leisure activities, and travel packages to spark interest and motivate bookings.

The travel industry is vast and continuously evolving. Some of the primary types of businesses that make up the industry include:

• Train operators
• Cruise liners
• Bus companies
• Car rental agencies
• Hotels and resorts
• Bed & breakfasts (B&B)
• Vacation rentals (e.g. Airbnb, VRBO)
• Camping and glamping sites
• Travel agencies (online and offline)
• Tour operators
• Online travel agencies (OTAs)
• Travel management companies (TMCs)
• Travel insurance providers
• Guided tours and sightseeing excursions
• Adventure activities and sports (e.g. skiing, scuba diving)
• Museums, galleries, and cultural centers
• Theme parks and amusement parks
• Restaurants, bars, and cafes
• National tourism boards
• Regional and state tourism offices
• City visitor bureaus
• Travel booking and comparison sites
• Mobile applications for travel planning and navigation
• Travel review and recommendation sites (e.g. TripAdvisor)
• Metasearch engines for flights, hotels, and car rentals (e.g. Kayak, Skyscanner)

Why is marketing in the travel industry important?

Marketing is an indispensable tool for travel brands. Without it, you would struggle to achieve your business goals. Effective marketing can help you attract more customers, increase your revenue, and establish a strong brand.

What are the benefits of travel marketing?

• Increased visibility: Marketing helps significantly to increase your brand’s exposure. This ensures that potential customers are aware of the travel services and experiences you offer and boosts overall visibility in the crowded marketplace.
• Customer acquisition: A well-executed marketing campaign attracts new customers by showcasing the value and unique aspects of your travel business, ultimately driving revenue growth.
• Improved customer retention: Marketing enables your travel brand to maintain long-term relationships with your existing customers by offering personalized and contextually relevant content and engaging with them consistently across channels.
• Enhanced customer loyalty: Including loyalty programs, exclusive offers, and personalized promotions in your marketing can build customer loyalty, leading to repeat business and higher customer lifetime value (CLV).
• Competitive advantage: Innovative and targeted marketing strategies can help your travel brand stand out from the competition, positioning you as a leader and providing an advantage in a highly competitive market.
• Increased revenue: Marketing can be used to generate upselling and cross-selling opportunities, increasing the average transaction value and ultimately resulting in higher revenue.
• Improved brand reputation: Using marketing, you can manage your online presence, customer reviews, and social media engagement. This positively influences your brand reputation, driving more business from potential customers who trust and value your brand.
• Informed decision-making: Leveraging data collected through your marketing activities for analysis and insights can help your business make informed decisions about product and service offerings, and marketing strategies, allowing you to optimize your efforts and boost performance.
• Expansion into new markets: Marketing can play a critical role in identifying new potential markets, demographics, and customer segments to target, enabling you to expand your reach and tap into new growth opportunities.
• Adaptability and resilience: Marketing enables you to react quickly to unpredictable events, market trends, and competitive moves, adapting your strategies to maintain customer engagement and drive bookings while ensuring resilience in the face of challenges.

Need to know marketing statistics for the travel industry

In today’s complicated and dynamic digital world, you must do all you can to understand the intricacies of the travel industry. Using these statistics, you will be able to get a bird’s eye view of global trends, customer behavior trends, and forces that are set to drive the multibillion-dollar industry forward in the years to come.

What are the challenges of travel marketing?

Despite economic uncertainty and the lasting impact of the pandemic, the travel industry is returning to pre-pandemic levels and enjoying steady growth.

Still, airlines, hotels, travel agencies, and other travel brands across the world are facing unique challenges that set you apart from typical marketing teams. In the ever-changing world of travel marketing, you have your hands full keeping up with the latest trends and technological advancements. Below are just a few of the top challenges you’re facing on an almost daily basis and how to overcome them.

With inflation in flux and travel expenses rising, travelers now consider price to be their top priority. To connect with your audience, you should emphasize low rates and demonstrate high value. Promoting discounts, bundles, and loyalty programs will appeal to budget-conscious consumers.

As remote work, digital engagement, and eco-consciousness continue to impact customer behaviors, you need to stay on top of trends to cater to emerging segments like bleisure (business and leisure) travelers. Data-centric platforms like Dotdigital plug into CRM systems and use machine learning can help brands understand these new customer groups.

With 86% of travelers seeking personalized experiences , you need to create tailored campaigns that resonate with your audience. Data collection and integration with CRM platforms are essential for delivering enjoyable, relevant, and personalized marketing experiences.

By understanding and following emerging travel trends, you can engage with audiences throughout the whole customer journey. You need to approach the journey holistically and create a cohesive experience across channels. Tools like single customer view (SCV) and eRFM will help you get a clearer view of travelers’ behavior.

To maintain your competitive edge, you must offer a seamless, efficient experience for customers, from booking to post-break feedback. You should tap into technology to adapt to market changes. Ensuring data quality and consolidation will help you reap the full benefits of new tech advancements.

To cater to your more environmentally-conscious travelers, you need to demonstrate a genuine commitment to sustainable practices. Avoiding greenwashing and adopting eco-friendly practices help you align your campaigns with customer values and support a greener future.

How to build a successful travel marketing strategy

Building a successful travel marketing strategy involves careful planning, targeting the right audience, and effectively leveraging your various marketing channels. Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating a winning travel marketing strategy:

Step 1: Define your target audience

Start by clearly defining your target audience. Conduct market research to determine their demographics, preferences, and behaviors. This will help you tailor your marketing materials to resonate with this specific group and achieve better results.

Step 2: Develop a strong brand identity

Create a memorable and eye-catching brand identity that encapsulates your company’s ethos and values. This includes your company name, logo, tagline, color scheme, and visual style. Consistency across all marketing channels reinforces brand recognition and establishes trust.

Step 3: Optimize your online presence

Create a user-friendly website that provides relevant information, showcases your offerings, and guides visitors to conversions (i.e. bookings or inquiries). Ensure your website has strong SEO to improve search engine ranking. Utilize social media platforms to engage with your audience and share valuable content.

Step 4: Leverage content marketing

Produce high-quality, informative, and engaging content that inspires travelers and provides value. This could include blog articles, videos, or destination guides. Diversifying your content not only keeps your audience interested but also addresses different stages of their customer journey.

Step 5: Monitor, analyze, and adapt 

Implement analytics tools to track your marketing efforts and identify what works best. Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) and adjust your strategy accordingly to optimize results. By continually learning from your data, you can make informed decisions and enhance your marketing effectiveness.

Boost growth with cutting-edge marketing technology

To enhance your visibility, captivate travelers, and boost bookings and inquiries, it’s essential to tap into the technology you have available. For peak success in the travel sector, you need technology that collaborates seamlessly with your existing tech solutions. 

Dotdigital’s customer experience and data platform (CXDP) delivers an array of travel marketing tools and channels through a unified, all-encompassing platform. By maximizing your technology usage, you can elevate traveler engagement, increase bookings, and optimize your travel marketing initiatives.

Email marketing for travel marketers

Email marketing is a powerful tool for the travel industry, as it enables you to reach your target audience, build lasting relationships, and drive conversions.

In this section, we’ll explore the benefits of email marketing and the essential elements of successful email marketing for travel businesses, including creating targeted campaigns, utilizing data to send personalized content, and ensuring that emails are engaging and mobile-friendly.

The benefits of email marketing for travel brands 

Email marketing is an essential tool for marketers in the travel industry for several reasons:

1. Direct communication channel

Email marketing is a direct line of communication with your target audience, allowing you to share news, updates, offers, and content straight to subscribers’ inboxes, enhancing engagement and nurturing long-term relationships.

2. Strong ROI

Compared to other forms of marketing in the travel sector, email marketing is relatively inexpensive while maintaining a high return on investment (ROI). This makes it one of the best options for travel brands looking to reach large audiences or target specific segments without breaking the bank.

3. Personalization capabilities

Email marketing enables you to create perfectly personalized content and offers based on your subscriber’s demographics, preferences, and travel or engagement history. Ultimately, personalization leads to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, as your audience feels catered to and valued by your brand.

4. Behavioral targeting

With email marketing campaigns, you can track various metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions, allowing a better understanding of travelers’ behaviors and preferences. This valuable information can be utilized to optimize future campaigns, ensuring better audience targeting and fostering long-term customer relationships.

5. Urgency and exclusivity

You can use email marketing to create a sense of urgency through time-sensitive offers, limited promotions, and exclusive deals, encouraging customers to book their travel or upgrade reservations.

6. Increased customer retention

By regularly sending informative content, helpful resources, and engaging promotions through email marketing campaigns, you will nurture customer loyalty and increase repeat bookings over time.

7. Relevance and timeliness

Email campaigns can be triggered based on specific events or customer actions, ensuring that the content is relevant and timely as per each individual’s needs. This could include sending reminder emails about upcoming trips or limited-time promotions resulting in better engagements and more conversions. 

Email marketing best practice for travel marketers 

Travel marketers can employ these best practices to create effective and engaging email campaigns:

Write catchy and enticing subject lines to increase open rates. Make your subject line relevant to the email’s content, and ensure it resonates with your target audience. Tap into the power of generative AI to really save time and improve results. 

Personalize your email campaigns by using the recipient’s first name and providing recommendations, content, or offers based on their preferences, travel history, or demographics.

Divide your subscribers into targeted segments based on factors such as geographical location, interests, booking history, or language, and send tailored content that appeals to each segment’s unique attributes.

Embed high-quality images and videos of destinations, accommodations, or activities to inspire and evoke emotions, leading to higher engagement levels.

Make your CTAs clear, concise, and visually emphasized, directing subscribers toward the desired action, such as visiting a web page, booking a travel package, or redeeming special offers.

Ensure that your email template is mobile-friendly, with easy-to-read text and a clean layout, as a large portion of your audience will likely read your emails on mobile devices.

Aim to provide valuable, informative, and engaging content that relates to the interests and needs of your subscribers, building trust and fostering lasting customer relationships.

A/B test various elements of your emails, such as subject lines, send times, layout, or content, to determine what generates higher engagement and conversions. Continuously optimize your campaigns based on the insights gained from these tests.

Keep track of key email marketing metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe rates to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and identify areas for improvement.

Regularly review and clean your email list, removing inactive subscribers or outdated addresses to improve deliverability and maintain a high-quality mailing list.

Segmentation strategies for travel marketers

Segmentation is a crucial tactic for all marketers, but none more so than marketers in the travel sector. It involves dividing your target audience into distinct groups based on their preferences, demographics, or behaviors.

Implementing a segmentation strategy allows you to create highly targeted marketing campaigns that resonate better with each group, ultimately driving higher customer engagement and conversions.

Top five benefits of segmentation

1. targeted marketing messages.

Segmentation allows you to tailor your marketing messages and content to specific segments, resulting in greater relevance, customer engagement, and conversion rates.

2. Improved customer experience

Offering personalized content, recommendations, and offers based on segmentation fosters a better customer experience, deepening brand loyalty, and strengthening long-term relationships.

3. Resource allocation

By focusing marketing resources on specific customer segments, you can effectively allocate your budget, time, and efforts, ensuring maximum impact for your marketing activities. eRFM customer modeling will help you identify highly engaged, high-value customers to prioritize.

4. Increased ROI

Using segmentation, you can build tailored campaigns designed to appeal to different groups, resulting in higher response rates and, ultimately, an increased return on marketing investment.

5. Market insights

Segmentation provides insights into your customer preferences and behaviors, helping you identify new market opportunities, improvement areas, or trends that can inform marketing strategy.

Top tips for implementing a segmentation strategy

Collect customer data from various sources, such as website behavior, booking history, survey responses, third-party travel partners, and CRM systems, and unify them to build a comprehensive understanding of your audience.

Utilize Dotdigital’s advanced segmentation tools, including eRFM (engagement, recency, frequency, monetary) modeling and single customer view (SCV) data. These features allow you to achieve more precise targeting and improved insights into customer behavior.

Develop content and promotional offers that resonate with the specific needs, desires, and pain points of each segment. Personalized marketing messages have a higher chance of engaging and converting customers. Use the data collected from Dotdigital’s eRFM and SCV features to inform these strategies.

Ensure that appropriate marketing channels are used for each segment. Different customer groups may prefer email, SMS, or other channels, so align your strategy accordingly. Dotdigital’s customer insights will help you build a seamless cross-channel marketing plan.

Continuously test and analyze the performance of segmented campaigns. Monitor key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and CLV to identify areas for improvement. Adjust your segmentation approach and marketing strategies based on these data-driven insights.

Customer preferences and behaviors change over time. Periodically reassess your segments, refresh your data, and leverage updated customer insights to ensure your marketing efforts remain relevant and effective.

Successful customer re-targeting

Discover how the holiday comparison site, Icelolly boosted conversion rates and enhanced its email marketing performance with personalized re-targeted marketing.

SMS marketing in the travel industry

SMS marketing is a powerful and often underutilized marketing channel that can boost engagement and provide exceptional value for travel businesses like yours. As a direct and immediate form of communication, SMS marketing can help you reach customers in ways other channels might not.

Benefits of SMS marketing for travel marketers

1. high open rates.

SMS messages have an exceptional open rate, with most recipients reading the message within minutes of receiving it. This ensures that promotional offers, updates, or reminders are seen by the vast majority of your target audience.

2. Real-time communication

SMS provides real-time, immediate communication that allows you to send time-sensitive offers, last-minute deals, or critical travel updates to your customers.

3. Mobile accessibility

With the vast majority of the population carrying mobile devices, SMS marketing provides an efficient way to reach your customers regardless of their location or internet access.

4. Cost-effective

SMS marketing campaigns are easy to set up and cheaper than most other marketing channels. This means you can effectively reach your target audience, even on a budget.

5. Personalized experiences

SMS campaigns can be tailored to individual users based on their preferences, interests, or travel history, creating a more personalized and engaging experience for your customers.

6. Easy integration with other marketing channels

SMS marketing can be easily combined with other channels such as email, app, or social media, to create a comprehensive and cohesive marketing campaign for your travel brand.

How to integrate SMS into your travel marketing

By adopting SMS marketing, your travel business can unlock new avenues of customer engagement and diversify your overall marketing efforts, ultimately boosting bookings and customer satisfaction. Here are some campaign ideas that can be implemented through SMS marketing:

Send helpful reminders for upcoming trips, pre-travel checklists, departure times, locations, or travel document requirements.

Share essential real-time updates like flight delays, gate changes, or itinerary adjustments, ensuring customers are well-informed and prepared. Ultimately, this will lead to higher satisfaction and experience overall. 

Send exclusive deals, discounts, limited-time offers, or last-minute specials to encourage customers to book travel or secure a service through your business.

Remind customers about travel packages, accommodation options, or services they were considering but have not completed the booking process.

Suggest relevant add-ons or upgrades to customers based on their travel plans, such as excursions, activity bookings, premium seating, or transportation options.

Request post-trip feedback, ratings, or reviews through an SMS message, using the insights to improve your services and customer satisfaction. SMS is a great channel for this because it requires little lift from your team and has a high completion rate. 

Notify customers of their rewards or loyalty points balance and inform them of any opportunities to earn additional points or redeem special offers.

Share useful destination-based information, such as local attractions, events, dining options, or safety tips, to enhance your customers’ travel experiences.

Top tips for successfully incorporating SMS into your travel marketing campaigns

• Combine SMS with email marketing Integrate SMS marketing into your existing email marketing strategy, sending important alerts, reminders, or limited-time offers through SMS to complement your email marketing activity.
• Segment your audience Create targeted SMS campaigns based on demographics, geographic location, or travel preferences, ensuring that your messages resonate with subscribers and are relevant to their needs in the moment.
• Personalize messages Deliver tailored content and offers based on customers’ booking history, travel destinations, or preferences, creating a sense of exclusivity and personal connection.
• Use automation Use customer actions to trigger SMS marketing campaigns, such as booking confirmation, travel reminders, or payment due notices. This will ensure your text messages are landing at the best time to drive customer conversions.
• Keep messages concise Deliver the key message or the call-to-action within the constraints of the character limit. Stay concise, and focused, and ensure your message is easy to understand. Tap into AI tools to help.

Using SMS for two-way communications

Discover how British Airways used Dotdigital’s two-way SMS functionality to encourage travelers to complete monthly customer satisfaction surveys. 

MMS for travel marketing campaigns

MMS (multimedia messaging service) is a branch of SMS marketing that allows the sending of multimedia content, such as images, videos, and audio files, alongside text messages. It presents new and exciting opportunities to engage customers in a more dynamic and visually appealing way.

MMS allows you to send rich visual content, including high-quality images and videos that showcase destinations, accommodations, or activities. This allows customers to get a better sense of the travel experience being offered and will inspire them to book.

Multimedia messages, including images and videos, have higher engagement rates compared to simple text messages. By leveraging MMS, you can evoke stronger emotional responses and drive customer interest, resulting in increased conversions and bookings.

MMS helps you to create immersive narratives by sharing pictures, videos, or audio clips of real travel experiences. This storytelling approach can help build a connection with potential travelers, increasing the likelihood of them engaging with your brand.

MMS can be customized based on individual preferences, interests, or travel history. By sending personalized multimedia content to customers, you can create a more relevant and memorable connection, ultimately fostering brand loyalty.

Although MMS adoption is growing, many businesses still primarily rely on text-based marketing. By being an early adopter of MMS, you can differentiate yourself from competitors and establish a unique brand identity in the minds of consumers.

MMS works well in conjunction with SMS, email, and social media campaigns. Integrating MMS into your overall marketing strategy can help create a comprehensive and cohesive approach that covers different stages of the customer journey.

Marketing automation for travel marketers

Marketing automation streamlines and optimizes repetitive marketing tasks, leading to enhanced efficiency, reduced manual efforts, and improved results. Intelligent marketing automation tools like Dotdigital create conversion-driving, loyalty-inspiring experiences by tapping into customer data and turning it into real-time marketing campaigns.

Benefits of marketing automation for travel brands

1. time-saving and cost-efficiency.

Marketing automation significantly reduces manual tasks associated with campaign management and customer segmentation, freeing up time for you and your teams to focus on strategic tasks, such as content creation and performance analysis.

2. Seamless communication

Marketing automation ensures regularly scheduled and consistent communication with customers across different channels. This is essential for maintaining customer engagement and building long-term brand loyalty.

3. Personalization

By tracking customers’ actions, preferences, and booking history, marketing automation tools help you deliver personalized and relevant content that resonates with your target audience. This moments-based approach to marketing enhances the overall customer experience, improving ROI, average order value (AOV), and customer lifetime value (CLV).

4. Cross-channel campaign management

Marketing automation platforms help you manage and coordinate campaigns across various channels, such as email, SMS, social media, and web push notifications, ensuring a seamless and cohesive marketing strategy.

5. Data-driven insights

With the help of detailed analytics provided by Dotdigital, you can make data-driven decisions, monitor campaign performance, and optimize your strategies for maximum results.

Essential automation programs for travel brands 

Set up automated welcome emails or messages for new subscribers, providing an initial introduction to your brand, exclusive offers, and personalized travel recommendations based on their preferences.

Automate booking confirmations, reservation details, and pre-travel reminders, ensuring all necessary information reaches the customer on time. This can include flight check-in reminders, pre-trip preparation tips, and travel documentation requirements.

Implement automated messages for customers who added travel packages or services to their cart but didn’t complete the booking process. These messages can include personalized incentives or offers to encourage conversion, AI-powered recommendations, or exclusive discounts for high-value customers.

Build automated re-engagement or nurture campaigns to connect with inactive or lapsed customers, offering relevant travel deals or content that sparks renewed interest in your brand. Use eRFM to identify these customers and SCV to gain insight into the channels and content that will drive them toward conversions.

Loyalty programs are a big motivating factor in the decision-making process of modern travelers. Automate loyalty program updates, notifications, or special offers to reward repeat customers and enhance long-term brand loyalty.

Automate post-trip feedback requests, analyze customer experiences, and collect valuable insights to inform improvements in your offerings and services. Positive reviews also make great marketing collateral so the importance of this program must not be underestimated. 

Schedule automated campaigns centered around holidays, seasonal offers, or special events, targeting customers with relevant deals and packages. Use customer insights to see when customers are most engaged or typically looking at your website to identify essential times to launch annual offers.

By understanding the benefits of marketing automation and implementing these recommended automation programs, you can streamline your marketing efforts, engage customers across multiple touchpoints, and enhance the overall customer experience while driving revenue and brand loyalty.

Marketing automation in action

Discover how international flight operator, Copa Airlines used Dotdigital to streamline its automated marketing communications to deliver a significant increase in revenue.

Web personalization for travel marketing teams

Web personalization involves tailoring website content to individual visitors based on their preferences, behavior, and demographic data.

In the travel industry, web personalization offers significant benefits and opportunities for enhancing customer engagement and boosting conversion rates. In this section, we’ll discuss the advantages of web personalization for travel marketers and provide strategies to create personalized online experiences.

Benefits of web personalization for travel marketers

1. enhanced customer engagement.

Personalized content and offers on your website can capture users’ attention and create a positive, engaging experience, increasing the likelihood of bookings and purchases.

2. Improved relevance

By addressing customers’ preferences and needs, web personalization ensures that your website’s content remains relevant and tailored to each user, making your brand more appealing to potential customers.

3. Increased conversion rates

Personalized content, offers, and recommendations can lead to an increase in customers taking action, whether booking a trip, subscribing to newsletters, or requesting more information.

4. Reduced bounce rates

An engaging and personalized website encourages visitors to spend more time exploring your offerings, reducing bounce rates and increasing the chances of customer conversions.

5. Improved ROI

By delivering personalized content and experiences to specific segments, web personalization can result in better use of marketing resources and a higher return on investment.

Strategies for personalizing web experiences

Show customers recommended travel destinations, offers, or services based on their current location, accounting for local events or geographic preferences.

Leverage customer behavior, such as browsing habits, pages visited, or previous booking history, to deliver personalized content, deals, or recommendations.

Divide your website visitors into specific segments based on demographics, interests, or travel preferences, and tailor website content to cater to these segments.

Implement exit intent pop-overs with tailored, last-minute offers or incentives that persuade visitors to book, subscribe, or engage further with your brand before leaving the website.

Use dynamic content that adapts based on user interactions, website behavior, or previous travel bookings, recommending related destinations, accommodations, or activities.

Employ remarketing campaigns that display personalized ads to users who have previously visited your website, featuring customized offers, messages, or promotions.

Integrate AI-driven recommendations into your website, providing visitors with personalized travel options across your homepage, product, and service pages.

Create dedicated, personalized landing pages for various promotions or travel offers based on customer segments, increasing the chances of conversions and bookings.

Push notification marketing for travel brands

Push notification marketing is a powerful tool for brands operating in the travel industry. It allows you to engage with customers directly through real-time, targeted, moments-based messages delivered directly to users’ mobile devices or web browsers.

Benefits of using push notifications in your travel marketing

1. increased engagement.

Push notifications give you new opportunities to re-engage customers by sending personalized promotions, announcements, and reminders. Ultimately, this enhances customer interactions and brand connection.

Timely and relevant notifications help you to communicate instantly with users, facilitating real-time updates on special deals, flight status, itinerary changes, or exclusive offers.

3. Higher conversion rates

By delivering tailored offers and targeted content, push notifications can increase conversion rates, driving bookings and encouraging customers to take action.

4. Improved user experience

Push notifications can enhance the user experience by offering personalized recommendations, location-based offers, and immediate assistance, fostering a stronger bond between customers and your brand.

5. Trackable performance metrics

Push notifications offer valuable performance insights, such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, helping you optimize campaigns and improve future marketing efforts.

Reporting and analytics for travel marketers

For marketers in the travel industry, maximizing efficiency and leveraging your budget and resources effectively is crucial. Utilizing advanced reporting and analytic tools can streamline and optimize your digital marketing efforts.

Advanced analytics and reporting tools 

Email reporting and analytics.

Email reporting and analytics provide insights into the performance of your email marketing campaigns. This information helps you to:

• Identify trends in your email marketing campaigns
• Ensure your campaigns are meeting their objectives
• Pinpoint areas that need optimization to enhance campaign performance

Email dashboards

Email dashboards provide you with an overview of all your email marketing campaigns, while email reports focus on a single campaign, outlining key performance metrics. By getting a bird’s eye look at your email marketing campaigns, you can discover:

• Statistics about your delivered, bounced, and skipped emails.
• Data about opens, unique opens, non-opens, and social shares.
• A heat map showing the areas of the world where your email campaign was most opened.
• The most popular links in your campaign, clicks, unique clicks, and click-to-open rates.
• Details about your winning and losing split tests.

SMS reporting

SMS campaign reports monitor channel performance, enabling you to continuously improve your marketing results. These reports showcase:

Helps track the frequency of SMS campaigns and analyze performance metrics over time.

Measures the effectiveness of your campaign, comparing the number of clicks to successfully delivered messages, which can inform improvements in content or targeting.

Indicates the percentage of recipients who completed a desired action, such as booking a trip or signing up for a newsletter, helping to evaluate the success of promotional efforts.

Evaluates the total revenue generated by a specific SMS campaign, determining ROI and guiding budgeting decisions.

Provides insight into the revenue generated from bookings or purchases influenced by an SMS campaign, even if completed through different channels.

Informs segmentation strategy by showing the number of segment groups targeted in the campaign, helping you assess the depth and breadth of your reach.

Indicates engagement with SMS content by revealing the number of clicks on embedded links, allowing you to better analyze which messages resonate best with your target audience.

Measures the reach of an SMS campaign by tallying messages successfully received, helping to gauge overall marketing effectiveness.

Provides an overview of SMS campaign volume, enabling evaluation of the relationship between quantity and campaign success.

Program analytics

Dotdigital’s program analytics tools offer several benefits to travel marketers, especially by helping you optimize your marketing automation programs and maximize campaign impact. Key benefits include:

Program analytics provide a comprehensive and data-driven overview of your marketing automation programs, allowing you to make informed decisions about marketing strategies and tactics.

The visual representation of the different nodes in your marketing automation workflow enables you to gain a deeper understanding of your programs and quickly identify areas that require optimization.

Dotdigital’s program analytics tools allow you to monitor the performance of your marketing automation programs in real-time, enabling you to quickly adapt to changing trends and make necessary adjustments.

The detailed view feature allows you to choose between different chart views (trend and cumulative) to get a granular analysis of key program metrics, providing insights tailored to your specific needs.

By evaluating the performance of start nodes, decision nodes, and action nodes, you can better understand customer interactions and optimize your marketing automation programs to increase effectiveness.

Program analytics tools can help you identify the success of different segments and decision paths in your automation workflows. This allows you to refine your targeting strategies and drive better results.

The ability to analyze the detailed data and insights provided by program analytics tools enables you to streamline your efforts, eliminate inefficiencies, and allocate resources more effectively. 

By providing in-depth data and insights on marketing automation programs’ performance, program analytics tools can help you optimize campaigns to maximize ROI. Through continuous improvement, marketers can generate better results and higher revenue, ultimately improving the overall ROI of their marketing efforts.

Advanced revenue attribution

Advanced revenue attribution is a method used to calculate the revenue generated by email and SMS marketing campaigns, based on clicks that lead to a purchase within a specified conversion window. Unlike direct tracking, which attributes revenue to clicks within a single window, advanced revenue attribution provides a more accurate and comprehensive assessment of how a campaign may have influenced the customer’s purchasing decision.

The benefits of using advanced revenue attribution include:

By tracing revenue to specific email and SMS campaigns, you can better assess the true influence of your marketing efforts on customers’ purchases, even if the purchase occurs outside the one-hour window of direct tracking.

Advanced revenue attribution offers a more complete picture of how different touchpoints contribute to your customer’s decision-making process, enabling you to optimize your campaigns for higher engagement and conversion rates.

Visibility into campaign performance through revenue attribution helps you to allocate budget and resources more effectively, focusing on campaigns that deliver the most significant ROI.

You can analyze the performance of email and SMS campaigns side by side, determining which channel is more effective at driving revenue and adjusting your marketing strategies accordingly.

By understanding which campaigns generate higher revenue, you can refine your targeting and segmentation strategies to engage the right audience with relevant and persuasive messaging, resulting in higher conversion rates.

Advanced revenue attribution can reveal patterns in customers’ behavior over extended periods, helping you identify crucial touchpoints for nurturing long-term relationships and customer loyalty.

WinstonAI™️ marketing intelligence engine

Designing a successful marketing campaign is far from easy. Especially in the ever-evolving travel sector, you must stay ahead of your competition. Embracing artificial intelligence (AI) at this early stage and leveraging it in your day-to-day marketing will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Benefits of early AI adoption

1. perfect personalization.

AI ensures you offer highly tailored experiences to your customers. By analyzing a vast amount of customer data, AI can identify patterns and preferences that are crucial for the creation of personalized marketing campaigns. As a result, your customers are more likely to be engaged and satisfied with their overall experience.

2. Data-driven decision making

AI-driven analytics provides you with actionable insights and data that help you make informed decisions. Early AI adopters can use powerful tools that analyze customer behavior, identify trends, and provide valuable recommendations. This ensures that your marketing resources are optimally allocated and drives higher ROI.

3. Time and cost efficiency

Adopting AI early on helps to streamline and automate your routine tasks. As AI can process a vast amount of data quickly, it saves time, increases productivity, and greatly reduces human errors. This frees up your time to focus on higher-value strategic and creative tasks.

4. Real-time optimization

AI provides real-time performance tracking and optimization opportunities for your marketing campaigns. By continually monitoring and adjusting, you can optimize your outreach methods, ultimately enhancing customer engagement, conversions, and revenue.

5. Competitive edge

Early AI adopters in the travel marketing sector will stay ahead of the competition by leveraging technologies that many competitors may not even be aware of. This provides a unique opportunity to gain market share and establish a brand reputation as a forward-thinking, innovative business.

WinstonAI capabilities

WinstonAI is Dotdigital’s industry-leading marketing intelligence engine, designed to simplify your daily marketing activity. Its ever-growing capabilities help you save time, money, and effort, further streamlining your market teams’ outputs.

Effortlessly create compelling content with WinstonAI’s innovative features, which include:

• Subject line assistant: WinstonAI helps elevate your subject lines by analyzing past engagement rates and generating inspiring suggestions for your next travel campaign.
• Email campaign assistant: WinstonAI not only offers alternative subject lines but also provides valuable feedback to refine your content. Get insights on tone evaluation and creative suggestions for your upcoming email campaigns.
• Grammar and spell check assistant: Eliminate time-consuming manual proofreading by using WinstonAI’s grammar check for emails, SMS, landing pages, and forms.
• One-click email to SMS generator: Save time by repurposing valuable email content into SMS messages for subscribers who prefer text messages. WinstonAI achieves this with just one click.

Transform your data into insightful actions with WinstonAI’s powerful analytics capabilities:

• Predictive analytics: Anticipate your customers’ behavior and adapt your marketing strategies accordingly, ensuring continuous engagement throughout their journey.
• eRFM segments and opportunities: Develop a deeper understanding of your customer base by integrating engagement scores with RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) ratings to create distinct personas.
• SCV and lookalike segments: Engage deeply with individual customer profiles using single customer view and generate segments with similar traits to your ideal customers.

Maximize your outreach potential and ensure your messages land at just the right moment with WinstonAI:

• Send time optimization: Enhance engagement levels by utilizing AI-driven send time optimization (STO) to deliver emails at the most opportune moment for the recipients.
• Automated reputation manager: Improve campaign performance and sender reputation by employing top-quality data that WinstonAI continuously monitors and evaluates.
• Watchdog data importer: WinstonAI’s data watchdog acts as a vigilant guardian of your sender reputation by safeguarding your delivery rates and thoroughly analyzing incoming email addresses.
• Non-human interaction (NHI) filtering: WinstonAI filters out activity from security tools or bots that can skew marketing results, providing you with a more accurate assessment of your campaigns’ performance.

Integrations and data management for travel marketers

From your booking systems and CRM to ticketing and customer service software, tech stacks for travel brands are vast and spiraling. The only solution is to have a customer experience and data platform that connects and unifies all your systems into a single source of truth. This will help you provide seamless and personalized customer experiences, streamline operations, and enable relevant and timely marketing activity.

Key integration and agency partners 

CRM systems allow you to manage and analyze interactions with potential and existing customers. This helps to maintain and improve customer retention, satisfaction, and revenue generation. Integrating your CRM and marketing channel providers ensures you have all the data you need to provide data-driven marketing campaigns. 

Integrations with booking platforms and reservation systems are crucial for streamlining traveler information management, allowing you to personalize offers and communications based on booking history and preferences.

Ticketing systems are vital for travel brands as they help manage and streamline customer support inquiries, leading to enhanced customer experiences. Integrating these into your marketing platform empowers cross-team collaboration, ensures timely communication, and improves customer retention as every interaction is accessible for marketers and customer service teams alike. 

Loyalty programs play a significant role in retaining customers and enhancing brand loyalty for travel brands. Integrating these systems into your marketing platform helps you tailor rewards and offers to customers based on their preferences, purchase history, loyalty points, and other relevant data. Personalized rewards lead to higher customer satisfaction and engagement, strengthening brand loyalty.

Integrations with review platforms such as TripAdvisor, Feefo, and Trustpilot enable you to monitor customer feedback, identify areas for improvement, and showcase highlighted reviews to increase credibility and trust.

Integrations that deliver results

Discover how the Australian tourism board, Visit Victoria used Dotdigital’s Zapier integration to segment, personalize, and automate tailored cross-channel re-targeting campaigns.

Travel businesses need to understand the different types of marketing channels and tactics available to them to effectively promote their products, services, and experiences. By utilizing innovative strategies, personalized promotions, and data-driven insights, travel businesses can stand out from the competition, attract new customers, and retain existing ones.

The travel industry is constantly evolving, and you need to keep up with the latest trends and technologies to succeed in the highly competitive market. With the right marketing strategy in place, travel businesses can capitalize on the current post-COVID travel boom and take advantage of the many opportunities available in the industry.

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The world’s leading travel media network

Our advertising solutions help you inspire, engage, and convert hundreds of millions of travelers — everywhere in the world.

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Get access to our award-winning in-house creative agency to create immersive and compelling interactive experiences that engage travelers. With Media Studio you can:

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Build a full-funnel experience that inspires, influences, and converts travelers. With display advertising you can:

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We have billions of data points from travelers using our 200+ travel websites. The benefit of this exclusive first-party data is unrivaled traveler insights, and, in a cookieless world, you’ll always be able to reach your target audiences with specific ads that align with their interests.

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Find out how we help advertisers meet their needs, from airlines and hotels to destinations.

The largest airline in Canada, has been a long-time partner with Expedia Group Media Solutions. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday approaching, Air Canada wanted to stay top of mind with travelers looking for deals during some of the most important sales events of the year.

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Looking to rebuild and renew, VisitScotland embarked on a tourism marketing campaign to highlight the unique experiences it offers travelers.

In a competitive market, visibility is key to filling room nights and Blinkup wanted to help Place of Charme connect with more travelers. To reach travelers worldwide, the marketing consultancy partnered with Media Solutions to showcase Place of Charme’s six properties on Expedia Group sites.

Recommended for you

The Path to Purchase

New research to help you understand how travelers search, plan, and book travel.

Travel Insights report

Our exclusive first-party data and research provides you with actionable insights.

TravelAds guide

Find out how to reach the right travelers and maximize results with TravelAds targeting and bidding tools.

Are you ready to advertise?

Get in touch with one of our digital advertising experts today to find out how our first-party data insights and full-funnel suite of solutions can work for you.

*Expedia Group internal data, 2023, identified and anonymous visitors.

Drive Demand, Convert Customers and Build Loyalty Through Sojern's Travel Marketing Platform

Our combination of data and technology lets you target your ideal travelers with unmatched precision and efficiency. The Sojern Travel Marketing Platform is a set of easy-to-use software and services backed by our own cutting-edge technology to deliver unrivaled traveler insight, intelligent audiences, multichannel activation and optimization, and guest experience solutions — all in one place.

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Your Success Starts Here: The Sojern Traveler Ecosystem TM

A deeper understanding of both the supply and demand sides of travel lets you factor in data like historical and behavioral trends, pricing, and inventory to help you make smarter decisions. In today’s market, putting this info to work is vital to growing your business.

The Sojern Traveler Ecosystem TM is the culmination of a decade and a half’s worth of collecting, aggregating and analyzing literally billions of travel intent signals every day—things like hotel and airline booking data from thousands of travel brands in every corner of the globe. It’s what truly powers our clients’ success and continued growth. The Sojern environment is overflowing with the deeper data that intelligent marketers crave: travel intent, historical bookings, first-party data, guest loyalty, benchmarking, supply and inventory, just to name a few. When our ability to see a customer’s full journey combines with your internal info, new possibilities emerge. Those travelers you thought were loyal only to you? Maybe they’re not. But without access to our knowledge, you’ll never know. Getting a better grasp of the global travel market puts the power back in your hands. Once we join forces, you’ll start to view travel dynamics in an entirely new light. This enhanced visibility means you can develop targeting strategies and create purchase paths much more effectively. The dynamic, multichannel world of travel demands the kind of next-level thinking that Sojern enables.

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Travel Marketing Best Practices: How To Apply The 7P’s To Make Your Travel Business More Successful

Understanding the crux of the 7Ps of marketing is pertinent for you as a tour operator. It can help you analyze your competitive strategies, capitalize on key elements of marketing to attract new customers and ultimately reach your sales targets.

The marketing mix involves various processes, each one focusing on different areas of your marketing strategy. These different processes all need to work together in order for you to successfully attract and generate new customers.

In this guide, we’ll break down the 7s of marketing and cover some of the most important travel marketing best practices to keep in mind with each of these different areas.

The 7Ps of Marketing for Travel Businesses 

The beauty of the marketing mix is that it helps you to set objectives and create a clear roadmap for your business to promote itself in the market. This includes the different marketing channels and tactics that are applied.

In 1960, professor Jerome McCarthy first proposed the idea of the 4Ps of marketing - which refers to the four elements that make up a traditional marketing mix. This applies to any kind of business. The 4Ps are

However, strategies in marketing have changed tremendously since then, and the way different types of businesses reach customers varies. This resulted in the 4Ps evolving. It only made sense to add additional Ps to accommodate all industries. These Ps include

• Physical Evidence

The 7Ps can help you attract your target audience more easily and provide the right kind of marketing messages and value to turn those prospects into paying customers.

Let’s break down the 7Ps of travel marketing.

1. Product 

First, there’s your product. This refers to what you’re selling your customers, and it’s what your entire travel marketing strategy will be centered around.

For many traditional businesses, a product is a physical item that you can place in your basket, or buy online and unwrap at home. However, in the travel industry, your product is not tangible. For travel businesses, such as travel agencies and tour operators, product refers to some kind of tour, service, or travel experience.

When it comes to travel marketing best practices, you must understand how your product fits into the market, and what type of demand there is for your product. You’ll also need to know the unique selling proposition (USP) behind your product, and what will motivate a customer to make a purchase (or, book a tour).

There are typically a lot more factors involved in the purchase decision process for travel products. For example, a travel business customer will need to

• Plan their trip around what free time they have available
• Plan their trip around the weather
• Purchase without understanding the direct effect, or benefits, the travel purchase will offer them
• Travel purchase decisions often involve a fairly large investment, without getting a tangible product in return

This means there’s a lot to keep in mind when marketing your travel product to your audience. Understanding the market conditions, the competition, and what makes your product special is essential for attracting and retaining customers.

Of course, you also need to offer a high-quality travel product if you want to make a lot of sales.

Some travel marketing best practices include sharing as many details about your products as possible on your website, sharing videos and images of your travel experiences on social media, and showcasing reviews and testimonials from past customers.

2. Place 

Place is an element of the marketing mix that refers to where and how you make your product available. Because your travel product is intangible, you will likely be selling it online (as opposed to a shelf in a shop). You could also be selling through a booking platform, an OTA , or a travel desk.

Whatever the case, travel marketing best practices here involve making sure that the place you sell your product offers a smooth customer journey. This means providing a booking process that is easy and secure, and that includes all of the information your customers could possibly want to know.

For example, your website should include detailed booking pages for each of its travel experiences, with an easy and secure payment gateway. This is easy to apply with travel booking tools like WeTravel . The right booking platform will reduce friction in the customer journey, helping you sell more tours.

3. Price 

The price of your product, or tour, is arguably the most important factor in your travel marketing mix. You need to price your tours strategically in order to make enough profit, be competitive in the market, and attract enough bookings.

First, you’ll need to understand the market and the competition to understand the costs of other tours in your area.

Second, you’ll need to align your pricing strategy to the USP and value your tour offers. It’s important to relate price to value. This is because customers will be willing to pay more for a travel experience if it is justifiable, and the extra money relates to extra value.

If you offer the same experience as the competition but charge more, then your tours will seem unappealing. If you offer added value to your travel experience, then you can get away with charging more. You’ll also be able to use this added value as your USP.

Of course, you also need to cover your overhead costs and make sure that your pricing strategy makes sense for your travel business.

How much you charge for your travel products determines how your business will fit into the market, so it's important to have a full understanding of your financial situation in order to price appropriately.

4. Promotion 

This element of the marketing mix is all about how you promote your travel business to your target audience. Travel advertising includes a lot of key tactics, so, you should choose ones that best align with your target audience and overall marketing goals.

When it comes to travel marketing best practices, it’s recommended that you utilize a wide range of marketing channels and processes. This could include:

• Email marketing
• Social media marketing
• SEO and content marketing
• Paid advertising
• Physical marketing (flyers, posters, etc)

It is also essential that you have an optimized website , as this is where you will direct all of your marketing efforts to generate bookings.

Whatever tactics you use to promote your travel business, you need to make sure that they align with your customer journey and with the behavior patterns of your target audience/buyer persona.

This means using marketing channels that your target audience routinely uses, and promoting the right messages and content on these channels to appeal to your viewership.

Of course, you’ll need to keep your USP and market positioning in mind when running your travel advertising campaigns. Use your promotional efforts to stand apart from the competition and strategically communicate why customers should book your tours and what kind of value they would get in return.

You can check out our guide to creating a travel business inbound marketing strategy for more tips and tactics.

5. People 

Who represents your business? This is incredibly important for travel marketing, as your products are closely linked and associated with the people who deliver them.

If you sell a product like a toothbrush, customers wouldn’t care much about who is behind the toothbrush. However, if you’re offering a guided tour through the Andes, then the person providing the tour is an essential factor in understanding whether the tour is worth purchasing.

This means that people are a factor in your travel marketing mix that you need to carefully consider and promote.

In terms of travel marketing best practices, anyone who comes into contact with a customer and represents your business must maintain a certain standard of friendliness and professionalism. The people behind your business play a major role in shaping the customer journey and influencing their purchase decision.

It’s also a good idea to display your credentials and experience on your website or booking pages. Use the people in your travel business to offer more value to your customers.

For example, you could highlight the fact that all of your tour guides are trained in first aid safety, or that they are experts on the local flora and fauna. This gives your tours a competitive edge and gives customers more reason to book your tours and helps them develop more trust in your travel business.

6. Processes 

Process is one of the unique “P’s” of marketing for travel businesses. This refers to the journey, or processes, that a customer goes through from when they book your tour to when they complete it. Your goal is to make these processes as enjoyable as possible for the customer.

Make sure that you offer customers all of the information they need at any given stage of their journey. You also want to ensure that your customers can easily communicate with your business when needed.

Some useful tactics involve sending automated consummation messages after a customer makes a booking, and sending the customer a pack of relevant information before the tour. All of their booking information, itinerary, waivers, and anything else, should be easily accessible.

When optimizing the processes in your marketing mix, it's also important to consider efficiency for your business. Your aim should be to plan out a strategy that is reliable, scalable, and efficient.

Using the right travel booking system is essential as it will help to provide a smooth journey for both your customers as well as for your business.

7. Physical Evidence 

This is the final element of the travel marketing mix. Physical evidence can seem tricky because travel experiences are largely intangible. This means it can be difficult for your customers to look into the physical evidence of your travel experiences before making a booking.

However, carefully presenting any physical details about your business or topics will play an important role. Keep your vehicles clean and well maintained, make sure your staff are well-presented, and carefully maintain your storefront if you have one. These elements all help to build trust.

You can also use your website to help you provide physical evidence around your tours. Make sure your website is modern, trustworthy, and functional.

You should also try to incorporate a lot of images and videos of your travel experiences into your booking pages, to help customers gain an idea of what these experiences look like.

Stay Ahead of Travel Marketing Best Practices 

Staying ahead of travel marketing best practices can be tricky because the industry is constantly changing. As technology develops and customer journeys change, so do the marketing tactics and strategies you use to attract new customers.

That is why it's important to stay ahead of industry trends with a reliable and trusted platform.

A key resource in this regard is WeTravel Academy . The sole focus of this resource is to create a valuable “database” (so to speak) to help all the professionals in the travel industry with a wide range of focus areas. This may include group and multi-day travel, international tour operators, other trip leaders, wellness, and retreats.

You can freely access a wide range of e-books, webinars, courses, and articles to help you stay ahead of industry best practices and grow as a professional and tour business.

Conclusion 

Understanding the key elements of a travel industry marketing mix is important for being able to develop a well-rounded marketing strategy.

You need to understand and address all of the different factors involved in the customer journey and decision-making process in order for you to be successful at marketing your travel company.

The travel marketing best practices above should help you lay the foundation. Of course, you’ll also need to be set up with the right travel software and tools to help you seamlessly implement these different areas of the travel marketing mix.

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Who wants to stay home when there’s so much to see and do across the globe? 

If you operate a travel company, your services will always be in demand. But you’re not the only travel brand on the market. 

The travel industry is highly competitive, with countless options available to consumers. So, successfully marketing your travel brand requires standing out. 

It’s not an easy feat. 

But with the right strategies in place, your travel brand can become the top-notch, go-to destination for consumers.

Educating yourself on the latest travel marketing trends is the first step. However, implementing them will require you to be adaptive and open to innovation. 

There are many benefits to keeping an ear to the ground on these trends. You stay ahead of the competition, build rapport with consumers, and much more. 

If you’re not sure where to begin, don’t worry. 

We’ve outlined 9 of the top trends in travel marketing. Plus, we offer examples of how these trends work and tips on how to make them work for you.

Ready to give your travel marketing and PR strategy an upgrade?

Let us help! Simply book a free consultation with one of our PR and marketing experts. We will take a look at you current mix to see where it could benefit from these travel marketing trends.

Travel Marketing Trends 2024

• Public Relations
• Micro-Influencer Marketing
• Video Content
• Optimized Google Business Profile
• Eco-Friendly Tourism
• Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality
• Personalization
• User-Generated Content
• Social Media Marketing

1. Public Relations is an Excellent Way to Build a Good Reputation

In the travel industry, a good reputation is vital and can significantly influence customer decisions. That’s why public relations (PR) is one of the most important travel marketing trends. 

PR helps you build and maintain a positive reputation through consistent brand messaging and responses to feedback. 

Also, with the abundance of travel options available, credibility is key for customers to trust your company. PR can help you build a positive reputation through media placements, mentions, and influencer relationships​​.

PR strategies involve creating personalized and localized content that resonates with specific audiences​​. When it comes to the travel industry, timing is everything.

Start preparing your PR plan a year in advance. Align it with your travel company’s seasonal calendar. This involves crafting timely PR responses for travel events, offers, or news. Early pitching of press releases and content is crucial for securing journalists’ consideration. 

Here is an example of a travel press release from Tripadvisor: 

Pro Tip : Use PR to highlight local stories, traditions, and experiences that travelers can only find at your destination. This can include featuring local artisans, unique cultural events, or hidden gems that aren’t widely known. And remember, press releases are only one type of PR content.

PR isn’t always an easy undertaking. We can help you streamline the process and build a positive brand image. Learn more by booking a free demo .

Ready to start your PR strategy? Need some ideas to get started? See our article: 18 Top PR Trends Shaping the Industry in 2024

2. Micro-Influencer Marketing Can Help You Reach Your Target Audience

About 11% of adults follow travel influencers. But not just any influencer will do. 

Micro-influencers typically have higher engagement rates compared to macro-influencers, placing collaboration with them among the top travel marketing trends. 

Their smaller audience size tends to foster a more personal and authentic connection. This can lead to higher levels of interaction.

Plus, micro-influencers often cater to niche markets, making them ideal for targeting specific segments of the travel market. This may include luxury travel, budget backpacking, adventure tourism, or cultural experiences.

Additionally, micro-influencers can provide tailored content that resonates deeply with their followers. These followers often share similar interests.

Start by using specific Google searches or hashtag searches on social media platforms to find influencers relevant to your brand. This can include “adventure travel influencers” or “luxury travel influencers.” 

Instead of scripted or overly promotional content, encourage influencers to share genuine experiences. Authentic storytelling can resonate more with audiences.

Here is an example of micro-influencer marketing in the travel industry: 

@katelyn_roth travel rankings ✈️❤️ #traveltiktok ♬ Run Boy Run (In the Style of Woodkid) [Karaoke Version With Backing Vocals] – Playback Audition

Pro Tip: Evaluate micro-influencers’ engagement levels and ensure their followers are genuine and active. Additionally, utilize their authentic voice to share honest and detailed perspectives about travel experiences. This can be more influential than traditional advertising​​​​.

Think influencer marketing is right for your brand? Get more influencer tips by reading our article: 9 Top Influencer Marketing Trends Shaping the Industry in 2024

3. Video Content Showcases Your Travel Offerings

Travel is inherently about stories, and video is one of the top storytelling mediums. That’s why video content is one of the leading travel marketing trends for 2024. 

Travel video content showcases the thrill of new experiences, the discovery of different cultures, and the personal transformations that occur on the journey. It leverages this natural storytelling aspect, which enables you to connect with audiences on a deeper level.

In the travel industry, customer engagement is critical. Video content marketing provides valuable and relevant information that keeps potential travelers engaged. This approach helps build a community of followers who are more likely to return for more information and bookings.

When leveraging video content, use high-quality video production. That includes a good camera (even smartphones can work in some situations), stable recording equipment, and external microphones.

Your video content should tell a story that resonates with your audience. It could be about the adventure, relaxation, culture, or unique experiences that a destination offers. Use compelling narratives to show the beauty and uniqueness of the location. Focus on what makes it different.

Below, you’ll find an example of video content in travel marketing: 

Pro Tip : Use a variety of video types to showcase the diversity of experiences your travel brand offers. This can include destination guides, travel tips, promotional videos, and customer testimonials. You can also include videos that answer frequently asked questions.

For more video marketing ideas, check out our article: Top 10 Video Marketing Trends for 2024 [+ Tips]

4. An Optimized Google Business Profile Boosts Visibility

With billions of searches conducted daily on Google, Google My Business profile optimization has become one of the top travel marketing trends for 2024. 

An optimized Google My Business profile increases the likelihood of your travel agency being discovered by potential customers. This profile appears in relevant search results, making it easier for travelers to find travel companies based on their search criteria​​.

It also helps lend credibility to your travel business. It displays important information such as contact details, customer reviews, and ratings. This transparency and availability of information can greatly influence a potential customer’s decision.

Start by claiming your Google My Business page. Even if Google has automatically created a listing for your business, you need to verify the information and optimize it. 

Ensure that all details are accurate and fully completed. This includes your Name, Address, Phone Number (NAP), website URL, business category, and description. For example, if you run boat tours, select “Boat Tour Agency” as your category. 

Here is an example of what travel marketing looks like on Google My Business:

Pro Tip : Use the “ Reserve with Google ” feature. This allows potential customers to book and pay for tours directly from your Google My Business listing. This feature simplifies the booking process and can be an advantage for in-destination bookings​​.

SEO is a great marketing strategy for travel brands. Get more SEO ideas by checking out our article: 9 Essential Search Engine Marketing Trends for 2024 (+ Tips and Examples)

5. Eco-Friendly Tourism is the Latest Travel Craze

There’s a growing global awareness about eco-tourism . This places promoting eco-friendly tourism among the top travel marketing trends. 

Many travelers are now more conscious of their ecological footprint and are seeking travel options that are less damaging to the environment. This shift in consumer behavior drives demand for eco-friendly travel experiences.

But what is it exactly?

Eco-friendly tourism often involves engaging with local cultures and communities in a more meaningful way. Many travelers today aren’t looking for superficial tourist activities. They want authentic experiences that offer a deeper connection to the places they visit.

Additionally, the trend towards health and wellness has expanded into the travel sector. Eco-friendly tourism often includes activities in nature. This aligns with the desire for healthful, outdoor, and wellness-oriented vacation experiences.

When marketing sustainable tourism services, it’s crucial to focus on a specific target audience. Research indicates that younger generations, particularly Gen Z and millennials, are most concerned about sustainable travel. 

Your marketing should cater to the platforms and content styles preferred by these demographics. This can include using social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. It can also include creating content that resonates with their environmental and cultural values. 

Earth Changers is one of the many eco-tourism companies promoting sustainability. Here is an example of what they offer:

Pro Tip : In your marketing materials, focus on the positive impacts travelers can make by choosing your services. For example, if your company contributes to conservation or local communities, articulate these impacts clearly.

6. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Provides Immersive Travel Experiences

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are among the most innovative travel marketing trends. They both provide an immersive experience unmatched by any other digital technology. In fact, there’s a growing interest in travel AR and VR across the globe.

VR offers a highly engaging form of advertisement. It allows potential visitors to feel as if they are already at the destination before they book.

Meanwhile, AR can provide comprehensive guided tours around museums or exhibitions. This can enrich the visitor experience with additional information and interactive elements​​.

Additionally, AR technology can be used to create gamified tours. This often requires users to scan images to activate travel experiences or mini-games. This both entertains guests and increases dwell time at various locations. 

This technology also allows users to go on virtual tours of famous landmarks while being in one place. They can get extra information while traveling to various locations. This “try-before-you-buy” method can significantly increase customer confidence and interest.

Try using VR to offer potential travelers a virtual tour of destinations, hotels, or experiences. Renderverse and Avatour are excellent VR tools for this. 

With AR, create interactive guides that travelers can use at destinations. For instance, pointing a smartphone at a historical site could display information or stories.

Rock Paper Reality is one AR tool used for travel and tourism. Here is an example of what it looks like:

Pro Tip : Transform the booking process with VR. Allow customers to virtually explore different room types, amenities, or even travel options. This allows customers to make more informed purchasing decisions as they shop.

Want to see how you can further integrate new tech into your marketing and PR strategies? Learn more here: 8 Marketing Technology Trends That Can Supercharge Your Marketing Efforts

7. Personalization is Key to Turning Consumers Into Customers

Why is personalization one of the leading travel marketing trends? It allows travel companies to tailor their services and communications based on individual preferences and behaviors. This strategy leads to a more satisfying and relevant experience for customers.

By providing personalized experiences, you can engage customers more effectively. This often translates into enhanced customer loyalty. Customers are more likely to return to a brand that understands their preferences and provides customized experiences.

How can you get started on personalization as one of your travel marketing trends?

First, you’ll need to gather customer data. AI and data analytics enable you to gather, analyze, and act on vast amounts of customer data. You can use this data to predict customer preferences and behavior.

Be sure to collect zero-party and first-party data. This can include information directly shared by customers and data gathered from interactions with your brand. Use this data to understand customer behavior in real-time.

Once you’ve collected your data, use it to segment your email list and social media followers based on interests, behaviors, location, etc. 

This enables you to create content that resonates with each group. For example, you can send location-specific offers to customers based on where they live or their destination preferences. 

Using quizzes is a great way to send personalized travel content to potential customers. Here is an example from Conde Nast Traveler : 

Pro Tip : Employ dynamic content in your emails to customize parts of your message for different subscriber groups. This approach allows you to send one email but tailor certain sections, such as offers and images.

Using AI can boost your PR and marketing efforts across the board. Want to see how others are using it? Check it out: 8 AI Marketing Trends for 2024 and Beyond (+ Tips & Ideas)

8. User-Generated Content Lends Credibility to Your Travel Brand

User-generated content (UGC) offers a level of authenticity that traditional marketing methods can’t match. That’s why it’s one of the top travel marketing trends. 

When potential travelers see real photos, videos, and reviews from other travelers, it lends credibility to the travel experience you’re promoting. Unlike professionally created content, UGC is seen as more genuine and relatable.

For travel companies, UGC is a cost-effective marketing tool. It reduces the need for expensive photo shoots and ad campaigns because it leverages content that customers create. This helps save money, time, and resources.

Plus, content created by users tends to receive more likes, shares, and comments. This higher engagement rate boosts your travel brand’s visibility. Plus, UGC fosters a greater sense of trust and brand authenticity.

When garnering UGC, encourage customers to generate content that highlights particular aspects of your travel offerings. For example, a retreat leader might focus on the serenity of the destination. A tour operator could emphasize the excitement of activities. 

Inform customers about the type of content you seek and explain how you will use it. Also, ensure that you have their permission to share it.

Testimonials are an excellent type of UGC. Here is an example of how they’re displayed on travel websites:

Pro Tip : Leverage UGC across multiple channels and formats for maximum impact. This can include featuring customer reviews on your website, creating social media feeds with curated customer content, and using customer images in recurring marketing campaigns.

Content marketing helps you inform your audience about your destinations. Want to see what’s trending? Learn more: 7 Top Content Marketing Trends 2024 [+ Tips and Tricks]

9. Consumers Often Use Social Media Platforms Before Booking Travel Destinations

Social media is one of the top travel marketing trends due to its vast global user base. And research shows that social media has the biggest influence on travel destination choices .

One of the reasons is that travel is a highly visual industry, and social media is an ideal platform for showcasing stunning images and videos. This visual appeal can capture the interest of viewers and inspire them to explore new destinations.

Plus, compared to traditional advertising methods, social media marketing is more cost-effective. Even with a limited budget, your brand can reach a large audience through targeted ads and organic content.

Not to mention, social media also allows you to engage with your audience in real time. You can respond to queries, gather feedback, and manage your reputation more efficiently. 

How should you incorporate social media as one of your travel marketing trends?

Keep an eye on current social media trends and adapt them to fit the travel industry. Use interactive content, such as polls, quizzes, and challenges. You can also run contests and giveaways, which are popular and encourage participation.

It’s important to be genuine in your social media interactions. Share real travel photos and stories. Diversify your content to balance promotional material with lifestyle, destination, and activity posts.

Here is an example of social media marketing for travel companies from Intrepid Travel : 

Pro Tip : If you have the budget for targeted advertising, consider using it. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram offer sophisticated targeting options that can be very effective in travel marketing.

Not sure what’s currently trending? Need more ideas on how to leverage social media? Read our article: 9 Top Social Media Marketing Trends Taking the World by Storm

Key Takeaways on the Latest Travel Marketing Trends

The travel industry is crowded with options with many companies trying to stand out at the same time. Making your travel brand front and center requires unique and innovative marketing strategies.

However, it’s equally important to be flexible and open to implementing these trends in your strategies. This adaptability is key to staying relevant and appealing in the rapidly evolving travel market.

As a travel brand, you have a destination to reach: increased engagement and ROI. Consider these travel marketing trends as the fastest possible route to getting there. Give them a try and find out which ones work best for your travel brand. 

Ready to get started? Not sure how to add these travel marketing trends to your mix? Let us help! Book a free consultation and we’ll look at how to boost your current strategy.

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How technology is powering a new generation of travel marketing

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By Chris Sutcliffe, Senior reporter

January 28, 2022 | 8 min read

Listen to article 4 min

Travel marketing is based on feelings and appeals to the senses. From adventure tours to city breaks, many of the most effective campaigns are based on creating tangible wants and desires in the consumer. As travel has been curtailed over the past two years, have tech solutions like VR and AR kept the dream of travel alive – and how else is technology empowering travel marketing?

VR, social media and more are transforming travel marketing

Despite how novel it feels in practice, using virtual reality (VR) tech to promote travel destinations is nothing new. Newspapers including The Financial Times were using 360° videos to profile cities as far back as 2016, and travel agents were using the wow factor of well-done VR experiences to sell packages the same year .

Since then, the rise of consumer VR tech like the Oculus Quest has allowed marketers to go further still. There are any number of fantastic VR travel experiences, from the hard-hitting like Traveling While Black, to the fantastic city tours available on every piece of VR hardware.

Andrew Kiguel is chief executive officer of Tokens.com, an NFT specialist with particular interest in the practical applications of VR. He tells The Drum: “We ’ve invested in a platform called Superworld; it takes a different standpoint in that they’re saying this is virtual tourism so you can go to Mount Rushmore or the Taj Mahal, walk around at your own leisure and see what this looks like. [It’s] something you might not be able to experience otherwise and there’ll be other virtual tourists walking around you can talk to and interact with.

“[It’s] not just like going to the real thing. This is a close second, especially during a pandemic.”

The use of VR to tell travel stories lies at the heart of many of the most effective travel marketing campaigns of the past two years – provided you can do more than simply plonk a 360° camera down and call it a day. The BBC recently invested in just such a narrative-led VR series with The Green Planet Experience, in partnership with EE.

In addition to having invested in on-board VR experiences, airline Qantas has placed marketing funds in VR, with its Qantas VR app having delivered videos that attempt to communicate the feeling of being in destinations including Sydney and the Great Barrier Reef.

John Speers is head of strategy of travel marketing specialist agency Kemosabe. He believes that the role of technology is to create that desire for sensory experiences, even when the technology itself cannot replicate them: “This is travel marketing and the future of it. To replicate (or give a taste of) that experience so palpable that you can’t wait to enjoy it in the real world. We’re not replacing it, as I believe that is impossible, but we are using best-in-class technology to replicate some dimensions of it to ‘whet the appetite.’ It’s marketing the experience, not replacing it.

“Whatever great experience you like, you have a visceral moment where you go, ‘how good is this?’ It’s a sensory experience that you can’t replicate digitally – the sights, smells, sensations, sounds, warmth, relationships, emotions, discomfort, whatever stimuli you pick up as a real live person from a real live situation. You just can’t get this online. No matter what the metaverse produces.”

Social tech

Beyond the flashy aspects of travel marketing in VR, our phones continue to play a huge role in generating the sentiment and desire around booking holidays and excursions. Instagram alone boasts a huge stable of travel marketers, many of whom partner with agencies, resorts or destinations in order to sell those packages.

Back in 2017 The Travel Project, an Instagram-focused project by two ex-ad agency creators, set the stage for further partnerships between platforms, destinations and influencers. And much of that is predicated on the ability of social media and platforms to create communities that share news about and experiences of travel with one another.

Speers says: “I agree with Brian Chesky, the founder of Airbnb, who believes ‘a more three-dimensional internet will replace a two-dimensional internet, not replace real life. I don’t think that’s any technologists’ vision that I’m aware of – that we never exist in the physical world. These digital experiences, to me, are gateways. There are ways for people to try Airbnb for $10 or $20. They can connect with a host without having to get on a plane and stay in someone’s home in another country. It’s a lower commitment.’

“This is exactly the ‘whetting of the appetite’ I refer to. Brian continues, ‘there is a major risk to the digital revolution: we are living in one of the loneliest periods in human history. When you take physical communities and you atomize them, they’re not always as nourishing as the physical world. No one has ever changed someone else’s mind in a YouTube comment section ... the best way to change someone’s mind is to walk in their shoes – to stay in their home, go in their community.’”

That advocacy through social media is also at the heart of how charitable travel companies including Planeterra have marketed themselves over the past few years. Rhea Simms, director of global programs at Planeterra, says: “The pandemic made a lot of Planeterra’s messaging become mainstream in many ways. One of the messages that was really prominent at the start of the pandemic and has continued throughout is the idea of buying and supporting ‘local.’ Many people became aware of the impact they have when it comes to supporting local businesses.

“Another key message that was coming to fruition was just how important the tourism industry was to local people in many destinations. Many travelers started to advocate and make it known they wanted their travels to have a positive impact, and as the world ’s leading non-profit using tourism to aid development were excited that many tourism operators have come to us as a result.”

Between the VR experiences that engender desire and the social campaigns that play on consumers’ desire to share their own experiences, technology is deeply embedded in travel marketing. While much of it has been accelerated by the pandemic, the reality is that humans are curious and social animals, keen to experience and share new stories.

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Additional resources

How to set up a social media for travel marketing strategy

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Social media and hospitality: How 3 brands are serving 5-star experiences

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How to effectively run a multi-location review management strategy

Managing reviews can be a challenge for businesses with just a single location. The effort is multiplied when you have multiple locations or a franchise model.

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The Top 12 Travel Marketing Trends Defining 2024

Erik Stubenvoll

Wanderlust is revitalizing the travel industry.

Amidst this boom,  travel advertisers rebounded with post-pandemic vigor, boosting ad spending by 15% in 2023 over the previous year.

Explore these 12 travel marketing trends that illustrate an industry recovering and reimagining its future.

1. Alternative ID-free targeting methods are surging in the new cookieless advertising era

With increasing concerns over privacy and Third-Party cookies’ impending phase-out , travel marketers must rely more on alternative methods like First- and Second-Party data, contextual marketing, cross-device audience targeting, and more.

Below are the top targeting strategies you’ll see to in response to this cookieless trend:

1.  First-Party Data

First-Party (1P) data , collected directly from customer interactions, is now the gold standard in travel advertising. This includes data collected through direct interactions, like website visits, app usage, customer feedback, and booking histories. 

Travel brands use this data to understand where and how their core customers interact with digital marketing placements.

2. ID-Free Artificial Intelligence (AI) & First-Party

ID-free targeting combines AI with First-Party data to analyze anonymous digital journey patterns, creating a map to identify the actions of similar website visitors. 

Advertisers can tailor their model using their own First-Party data to forecast and choose impression opportunities.

3. Second-Party Data

Collaborating with trusted partners to use Second-Party data involves collecting data through deterministic processes like login IDs, providing a more accurate and scalable way to target specific audience segments.

4. Contextual Marketing

Contextual marketing targets ads based on the content currently being viewed by users, replacing the need for Third-Party data.

Contextual marketing matches ads with the user’s current interests and the webpage’s theme, enhancing relevance and audience engagement.

AI-powered contextual marketing analyzes audience actions in real time to identify engagement patterns, enabling brands to target similar content to new audiences at optimal moments.

Travel marketers should explore and implement cookieless solutions, experimenting with strategies that best align with their brand and audience to stay ahead this year.

💡 The Takeaway

Travel marketers must adopt cookieless targeting strategies like First- and Second-Party data, ID-free AI, and contextual marketing to achieve precise, privacy-compliant audience engagement.

2. Sports tourism is very popular amid the Paris Olympics & other big events

Sports tourism will continue to surge in 2024, fueled by high-profile events like the Paris Summer Olympics , the FIFA World Cup , March Madness , and the Super Bowl , where tourists book travel tickets at least a year in advance.

The appeal of sports tourism is growing due to new tournaments and a rise in women’s sports participation, including events like the Women’s Big Bash League and the women’s edition of the Indian Premier League.

Increased government funding, initiatives to promote sports tourism, and a rise in young athletes are also major influences.

Travel marketers can take full advantage of this surge by integrating strategies, such as advanced TV advertising strategies like Connected TV (CTV) and Picture-in-Picture (PiP) (a type of interactive CTV) advertising , as well as advertising on Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV (FAST) channels.

PiP allows viewers to watch live sports and other content, allowing travel brands to present appealing packages during these events.

Sports tourism’s rising popularity, driven by major events like the Paris Olympics and increased women’s sports participation, presents a significant opportunity to use advanced advertising strategies and tap into this growing market.

3. Video content to expand target audiences & enhance website traffic

Integrating traditional blog posts with concise, visually engaging video content on platforms like TikTok and Instagram greatly enhances a brand’s reach and website traffic potential.

TikTok’s user growth–approximately eight new users every second –highlights video content’s potential to reach a broad audience. This trend isn’t lost on travel companies, which they use to engage customers better.

Video content for travel marketing serves multiple purposes:

• Sharing Holiday Experiences: Travel companies use videos to give potential customers a glimpse of the experiences that await them, making these destinations more tangible and inviting.
• Highlighting Destination Information: Videos provide a dynamic way to showcase the attractions and uniqueness of a country or destination, offering viewers a virtual tour that text alone cannot match.
• Presenting Activities and Experiences: Through video, travel brands can vividly depict the range of activities available at a destination, from adventurous excursions to relaxing retreats, engaging viewers with the possibilities.
• Conveying the Destination’s Essence: Videos enable travel companies to capture and convey the essence of a destination – its culture, scenery, and atmosphere – creating a compelling narrative that draws viewers in.

Online video (OLV) and Connected TV (CTV) have also opened new avenues for reaching families and larger audiences, especially using cross-device targeting.

For example, a family watching a Royal Caribbean cruise ad on CTV is later targeted with personalized smartphone follow-up offers, enhancing engagement and allowing travel marketers to track the ad’s effectiveness across multiple platforms.

💡 The Takeaway Integrating visually engaging video content, such as on TikTok and Instagram, alongside traditional blog posts can significantly expand a travel brand’s reach and website traffic potential, engaging viewers with immersive storytelling.

4. TikTok emerges as a modern travel guide to engage younger audiences

TikTok has transformed travel guides, with videos replacing traditional blog posts as the go-to source for travel inspiration and information.

Since 2021, TikTok has seen a staggering 410% increase in views of travel content, with 71% of European users likely to book a holiday based on TikTok recommendations. 

🌴 TikTok Made Me Travel There 83% of Spanish users would consider a travel product or activity after seeing it on TikTok.

TikTok’s community craves content that stirs wanderlust, showcasing unique destinations and experiences.

TikTok’s findings on the top travel content for 2023.

Travel brands should align their content strategy with the top emerging TikTok travel trends and user preferences, such as:

• Luxury Travel: Many users discover affordable luxury destinations on TikTok, increasing interest in these experiences. Brands should showcase any luxury options.
• Domestic Travel: As travel preferences shift towards more local experiences, brands should highlight unique local travel experiences.
• Sustainable Travel: Sustainability is a growing concern among TikTok users, with hashtags like #SustainableTravel and #EcoTourism drawing millions of views. Travel brands should promote eco-friendly and sustainable travel options.

Adapting to these trends, travel brands can inspire, engage, and connect with a travel-enthusiastic audience.

TikTok is a prime platform for travel inspiration and recommendations. Travel brands should align their content with emerging TikTok travel trends like luxury, domestic, and sustainable travel to engage younger audiences effectively.

5. Influencer marketing is a resurgent force, especially on TikTok

According to a MediaRadar report, as major travel categories (e.g., airlines, lodging, rental car companies) ramp up their marketing efforts, a substantial portion of their budgets is allocated to partnerships with creators and influencers.

Influencers, with their large followings and ability to generate authentic content, offer a personal touch and a sense of trust that traditional advertising channels often can’t match. 

Local influencers help draw their following to restaurants and other locations in the area.

@gracietravels i bet you didnt know about these! 🫣 ✈️ #travelhacks #traveltiktok #travelfyp #travellife #traveltips #travelhack #traveltok ♬ original sound – grace | TravelCreator✨

Gracietravels shares helpful dos and don’ts for various exotic locations.

As travel marketing continues to surge, much of marketing spending will likely go to creator partnerships, increasing total influencer marketing spending.

Influencer marketing is returning, particularly on TikTok, with significant budgets allocated by major travel categories for partnerships with creators who offer authentic and trustworthy content.

6. Eco-tourism is a rising star, especially among younger travelers 

Ecotourism focuses on travel experiences that preserve and sustain natural environments while improving the welfare of local populations.

A lust for more outdoor travel experiences, urbanization, and affordable flight availability primarily drives ecotourism’s popularity. Generation Y (millennials) dominates ecotourism, with 60% of the share and spending $200 billion on travel.

For example, #SustainableTravel boast s 78.1 million views, and #EcoTourism garnered 72M views on TikTok.

Booking.com found that 76% of survey respondents planned to travel greener, up 15% from 2021. 55% of travelers seek off-the-grid vacations for escapism, with 44% preferring simpler travel experiences.

Hotels are increasingly committing to go carbon-neutral by 2050 or earlier to appeal to eco-conscious travelers. The Brutalist-style Hotel Marcel Hilton in Connecticut is the first net-zero carbon emissions hotel in the United States.

Travel marketers can tap into these younger generational and eco-conscious segments by focusing on eco-friendly and unique travel experiences in their campaigns.

Ecotourism is on the rise, driven by the popularity of outdoor travel experiences and younger generations like Millennials and Gen Z. Travel marketers can cater to eco-conscious travelers by highlighting sustainable initiatives.

7. Virtual reality offers virtual tourism opportunities

As VR technology becomes more sophisticated and accessible, it opens up new opportunities for consumers and advertisers.

Innovative services like Discover Live and Wowzitude , are offering interactive virtual vacation tours, allowing users to experience destinations before they decide to visit them in person.

Companies like Meta are enhancing the VR experience, with products like the Oculus headset offering virtual tours of world-renowned sites, such as the reconstruction of Notre Dame.

Platforms like Renderverse and Avatour provide VR-based real estate and travel tours, allowing users to explore properties and destinations remotely.

The VR space also opens up the potential for partnerships and sponsorships. For instance, theater groups could secure corporate sponsorships by integrating ads into their VR performances.

Despite its growing popularity, VR technology is still evolving. Users want high-quality, real-time experiences to share with friends, pushing the boundaries of current VR capabilities.

Virtual reality (VR) technology offers immersive virtual tourism experiences and advertising opportunities, driven by innovative services and products, but the demand for high-quality, real-time VR experiences continues to challenge its growth.

8. Adapting to SEO & local SEO in the AI age

Advanced AI models like Google’s Gemini signal a trend toward AI-generated content rich in quality and relevance. Gemini can understand diverse formats like text, images, and even audio.

Google’s Search Generative Experience will integrate diverse content formats like videos, web stories, and podcasts in SERP (search engine results pages) optimization to directly engage users from the search results. A consistent and diversified presence across these channels can help travel brands capture more organic traffic, complementing paid search strategies.

For travel marketers, the increasing need for personalized, localized, and experiential local strategies signifies a shift towards creating more immersive and region-specific content. 

Create content that resonates with the local culture and experiences. This includes local posts, stories about the area, and highlights of unique local attractions.

In the AI age, travel marketers should prioritize creating immersive and localized content to enhance SEO and engage users effectively.

9. Travel apps are transforming how travelers organize trips

Travelers have a growing demand for travel apps, with the industry witnessing a 53% increase in the last year.

These platforms serve as digital travel agencies, offering a seamless interface for managing bookings, accommodations, and activities. They offer convenience without juggling various booking sites and the fear of falling into tourist traps or overpriced services.

As digital tools for trip planning become more popular, opportunities in marketing partnerships, targeted ads, and direct customer engagement grow. Booking.com leads with its intuitive design and broad booking capabilities.

Meanwhile, niche apps like TakeMeOutOfOffice , Brevity , and LetsBatch cater to unique travel needs, offering specialized services for leisure breaks, business trips, and group travel, respectively.

10. Return to hotels in the face of Airbnb’s growing challenges

Despite financial prosperity, with bookings hitting unprecedented highs and the company celebrating its first full profitable year in 2022, Airbnb confronts a mix of discontent from guests, hosts, and cities alike. 

Issues range from the platform’s rising costs to the mismatch between online portrayals and actual accommodations, alongside stringent regulations from cities aiming to curb short-term rentals.

Airbnb listings surpass available apartments:

• Airbnb listings outnumber available apartments in NYC areas (Manhattan, Brooklyn, northwest Queens).
• Asheville, NC: 2,881 Airbnb properties vs. 250+ long-term rentals.
• Austin: 12,205 Airbnb listings vs. 3,700 long-term rentals.

Airbnb’s growing challenges, including rising costs, regulatory pressures, and guest dissatisfaction, are driving a noticeable shift of some travelers back to traditional hotels.

11. New Airbnb-style car rental companies are taking off

Skyrocketing rental car prices were a popular frustration during pandemic-era travel stories, hitting record highs in July 2021. Turo , a peer-to-peer car-sharing platform, allows car owners to rent their own cars to regular people, like an Airbnb for cars.   The global car-sharing market surpassed $2 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow at least 20% annually through 2027. Taking advantage of the industry’s growth, other companies like Getaround and Car Shair are quickly following. These platforms cater to a growing consumer demand for more accessible, cost-effective, and flexible car rental options. Whether or not it will face the same fate as Airbnb is yet to be decided, though it is certainly challenging traditional rental agencies.

The rise of peer-to-peer car rental platforms signifies a transformative shift towards economical and personalized transportation options, challenging traditional rental models.

12. Travelers want nostalgia & more family time

A staggering 88% of travelers desire nostalgic getaways that hark back to yesteryears—be it visiting locations of retro film fame or opting for bus travel reminiscent of school excursions.  23% of travelers, including millennials and Gen Z who have not experienced it firsthand, are yearning for pre-digital charm, seeking an escape to a simpler time. This sentiment is fueling interest in popular destinations in the ’80s and ’90s, such as Budva in Montenegro and Bolzano in Italy, both trending locations in 2023. Furthermore, family travel is evolving, with 54% of respondents planning multi-generational trips or “family reunion” vacations.

There’s an increasing demand for nostalgic travel and multi-generational family trips. Offering competitive Child Rates is a strategic move to capitalize on this trend. Such initiatives can potentially boost family bookings by 15% on average.

Travel Advertising Trends in 2024

The shift towards cookieless advertising, the rise of sports tourism, the dominance of video content, and the growing influence of platforms like TikTok and VR technology are redefining how travel brands engage with their audiences.  With a stronger focus on eco-tourism and the integration of AI in SEO strategies, travel marketers are poised to deliver more personalized, immersive, and sustainable travel experiences. Adapting to these trends will help travel brands stay ahead in a competitive market and meet diverse traveler needs around the globe.

About the Author

Erik Stubenvoll is a Managing Director at KORTX with over 20 years of experience. When he is not learning about his client’s goals, he is on the sidelines with his wife at his daughter’s softball and soccer games or on the golf course.

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Elevate Your Hotel and Travel Business with Social Media: Strategic Insights for Decision Makers

Written by Anna Sonnenberg

Last modified Sep. 19 2024

Table of Contents

For hotels and travel businesses, social media is an essential channel for customer acquisition, engagement, and loyalty. When planning trips,  75% of people use social media as a source of inspiration. And nearly half choose Instagram-worthy destinations to show off their travels online.

So, how can your brand leverage this channel to influence travel decisions and get more bookings? In this article, we’ll cover how to use social media marketing to attract, engage, and convert customers via organic posts, social ads, user-generated content (UGC), and influencer marketing.

Overview of Social Media for Marketing and Branding

Social media marketing is all about building your brand, connecting with customers, and promoting your business on the platforms where your customer base spends time. With social media, you can reach your target audience at every stage of the funnel—from awareness to consideration to conversion to loyalty.

Whether you’re in a competitive hotel category or an emerging travel niche, social media is ideal for showcasing your unique brand identity. From the look of your photos to the feel of your videos to the tone of your captions, your brand’s identity can set it apart from the competition and attract customers across platforms.

For example, Holiday Inn Express uses multiple social channels to promote the hotel chain’s affordable rooms and free perks. In a Facebook post , the brand spotlights a hotel near a major sporting event, showcasing the convenient location, comfortable rooms, and complimentary breakfast.

In an Instagram post , the brand highlights free breakfast offerings, a unique selling point for the hotel.

In a TikTok video , the brand uses trending audio to create a meme about customers’ love for the hotel’s free cinnamon rolls.

How Social Media Can Influence Customer Decision-Making

From Facebook posts to Instagram Stories to TikTok videos, social media gives hotels and travel brands countless opportunities to influence travel decisions and guide customers toward a conversion.

One way to capture interest and inspire bookings is through storytelling. Weave compelling narratives with photos, videos, and words to give followers a feel for the destination and the experiences that await.

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority uses Instagram stories to share experiences from a tourist’s point of view. The story below walks followers through a multi-course meal at upscale restaurant Wakuda, located inside The Venetian Resort.

No matter which format you opt to use, always aim to produce high-quality images and videos. When you prioritize visual appeal, you’ll have an easier time grabbing attention and holding interest as viewers scroll through their social media feeds.

On Facebook, Viking Cruises publishes eye-catching images with text overlays that quickly introduce the topic. The post below also includes several photos that give followers a glimpse of what to expect from the itinerary.

As a hotel or travel brand, you don’t always have to create original content for social media. Sometimes you can let customers do the talking.

When you share testimonials and reviews, you create social proof that has the power to influence customer behavior. Because  99.9% of consumers read reviews before making purchases online, sharing customer quotes on social media can positively impact followers’ travel choices.

In the Facebook post below , the InterContinental Chicago Magnificent Mile quotes a happy hotel guest, shares their photos, and encourages followers to book a similar stay.

User reviews are just one way to let customers do the talking. Influencer collaborations can also help you share authentic experiences while boosting brand credibility and swaying customer decisions. We’ll discuss influencer marketing in depth below.

How Social Media Can Provide Direct Communication and Customer Engagement

One of the biggest benefits of social media is the opportunity it creates for two-way communication. No matter which social platforms your brand uses, you can use them to engage with customers and followers.

In many cases, you can communicate with customers in real-time. For example, you can:

• Respond to customer questions via direct message (DM).
• Engage with followers’ comments on your social media posts.
• Provide customer support and assist with bookings.

To respond to customers more efficiently, use a unified social inbox . With Agorapulse, you can monitor comments and messages for all connected social profiles on a single browser tab. This means you can stay on top of all engagements without having to jump between tabs or sign in and out of accounts.

Agorapulse also supports saved replies . Create a library of responses to common questions or comments to reuse them easily. Before pressing “send,” personalize your reply or tailor your offer based on previous interactions with the customer.

On some social platforms, you have even more options for connecting with customers. For example, Facebook has groups that allow both brands and customers to post content and start conversations.

Instagram has broadcast channels where travel creators can share announcements and ask questions. Travel agent  @disneywiththeminnies has a broadcast channel for sharing resources and polling followers.

On platforms like TikTok and Instagram, you can reply with a video when a written comment won’t do your response justice. In the TikTok video below , @heather_thetravelagent responds to a follower’s question about the top Disney cruise ships.

Key Social Media Platforms for Hotel and Travel Businesses

Before you invest resources into creating social media content, make sure to choose the best platforms for your brand. Let’s take a look at a few of the most important social media channels for hotels and travel businesses.

Facebook is ideal for telling travel stories through photos, short-form reels, and long-form videos. Since this platform allows external links in posts, it’s also great for linking out to booking pages, special offers, or news.

The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company  uses Facebook to announce new hotel locations and share links to resort landing pages. In all of its Facebook posts, the brand includes high-quality images to convey the upscale experiences that await at each hotel property.

To encourage customer loyalty, consider creating a Facebook group. There you can start discussions, members can ask questions, and your brand can reward loyal guests with special offers.

Sister travel businesses The Mouse for Less and The Magic for Less have a dedicated Facebook group for travelers interested in Disney and Universal Studios vacations. Members can use the group to learn about discounts and find resources to plan their trips.

If Millennials and Gen Z make up a large percentage of your target audience, plan to prioritize Instagram . Out of all social platforms, Instagram is the top choice for trip planning among these two groups.

Between feed posts, carousels with up to 20 images or videos, and short-form Reels, travel brands have plenty of options for visual storytelling. For example, you can create reels featuring mini-guides to destinations or carousels highlighting hotel amenities.

Lonely Planet uses both formats to publish visually appealing destination guides and travel tips. In the Lonely Planet Reel below, a travel editor walks viewers through a trip to Hong Kong, giving the guide a personal touch.

Because they automatically disappear in 24 hours, Instagram stories are ideal for sharing limited-time offers or less polished content that might not fit on your feed. Stories are also great for sharing UGC made by guests.

The Grand Hyatt Baha Mar uses stories to share guests’ content. This approach is helpful for thanking creators and giving followers a glimpse of how their visits could look.

X certainly supports visual content. However, hotel and travel brands tend to use it less for storytelling and more for announcing news, sharing time-sensitive updates, and participating in travel-themed X chats.

The  Royal Caribbean post below announces a travel award and shares several eye-catching images. But to read the full story, followers have to tap the link.

Norwegian Cruise Line also uses X to share external links and promote offers. In the X post below, the cruise line uses the platform’s poll feature to ask followers about their upcoming travel plans.

Some hotel and travel brands also use X to provide customer support, and some have dedicated profiles for this purpose. In the Choice Hotels post below, the hotel chain provides time-sensitive assistance for a guest.

Because both Gen Z and Millennials consider YouTube their second favorite platform for planning trips, it should be a priority for most hotel and travel brands. As a video-based platform, YouTube is ideal for creating immersive content like virtual hotel tours and complete destination guides.

Below, travel brand Attaché shares a long-form guide to the innovative food scene in Vilnius. The video description includes links to the brand’s other guides to Vilnius and nearby European cities, helping to boost views across the channel.

Another smart strategy for increasing video views on YouTube is collaborating with vloggers. When you work with vloggers, you can benefit from their talent and tap into their audience.

Travel creator Oneika Raymond hosts Marriott Bonvoy’s About the Journey series. In each episode, she welcomes various guests, who provide unique takes on destinations they know and love.

To maximize the visibility of your content, keep YouTube search engine optimization (SEO) basics in mind. Include keywords in video titles and descriptions to make them easier to discover via search. Experiment with thumbnails to determine which styles are best at attracting views.

As a short-form video platform, TikTok is best for publishing engaging videos and entertaining memes for younger audiences—mainly travelers aged 18 to 34 .

Expedia uses TikTok to share short videos featuring travel tips and 24-hour destination guides. The travel brand publishes content produced by accomplished travel vloggers, such as the  guide to Reykjavik below.

When you create content for TikTok, keep trends in mind. Consider how you can make them relevant to your travel or hotel brand.

In the TikTok video below, Hilton shares the hotel brand’s take on the “things I’d win a gold medal in” viral trend. The brand also responds to top comments to build stronger relationships with followers.

Strategies for Effective Social Media Marketing

Whether you opt to focus on one or all of the platforms above, you need a social media marketing strategy to reach your goals. Use these tips to develop an organic and paid strategy for your hotel or travel brand.

Creating a content strategy

Before you begin creating content for social media, work with your team to set goals. Prioritize SMART social media goals , which are:

• Specific : Clarify what you want to achieve and why.
• Measurable : Choose a goal you can quantify so you’ll know when you’ve achieved it.
• Attainable : Pick a goal you can realistically achieve, given your available resources.
• Relevant : Focus on a goal that aligns with your organization’s business goals.
• Timely : Set a time frame, including milestone dates for major goals.

For example, suppose your hotel brand aims to drive more business with social media to meet the organization’s quarterly sales goal. Your social media goal might be to secure 500 bookings before the end of the quarter using a mix of YouTube videos, Instagram reels, and Facebook posts.

Next, map out a content calendar that supports your goal. Make sure to consider key dates like seasonal sales, industry trends, and local events.

With Agorapulse’s publishing calendar, you can add notes with general ideas and drafts of posts in progress. You can also schedule posts for specific times or publish them immediately.

You can easily cross-post between social profiles, too. Just create a single post, select all the profiles where you want to publish, and customize as necessary. For example, you may want to add a link to Facebook posts or hashtags to Instagram posts.

Leveraging user-generated content

Content created by happy guests can sway travel decisions just as much as (or even more than) branded content. As a result, it’s a good idea to supplement your team’s original content with UGC.

To collect UGC, encourage guests to share their experiences. If you plan to share their content in the feed, ask for permission first. Then credit the original creator in the caption.

Rick Steves asks followers to share photos in the comments of Facebook posts. Travelers get to show off their trips, and the brand gets to collect UGC showing people visiting the landmarks featured on travel guide covers.

The Hyatt Zilara Riviera Maya includes a hashtag in the hotel’s Instagram profile. When guests add the hashtag to their posts, the hotel can easily find the content and share it.

With Agorapulse, you never have to miss great UGC. When you set up a social listening search for your brand, you’ll get notified when an account mentions your profile or uses your hashtag on select social platforms.

To collect an even higher volume of UGC, incentivize guests. Consider running a contest that rewards guests for creating and sharing content. You might offer rewards points, a complimentary meal, or a free tour.

Collaborating with influencers

More than 40% of people take note of travel influencers when planning trips. In some markets (UAE, India, and Indonesia) influencers have an even greater impact on travel-related purchases.

No matter where your hotel is located or where your travel business is based, it’s worth experimenting with influencer marketing. The key is choosing influencers whose audiences align with your own and share similar interests, values, and demographics.

On Instagram, Viator partnered with Shawn Johnson to promote a tour of Paris. By recruiting the Olympian to promote the travel brand during the 2024 games, Viator made the collaboration both timely and relevant to its adventurous audience.

When you collaborate with influencers, make sure to set goals before launching the campaign. This way, you’ll be able to gauge whether the campaign is successful and make an informed decision about the next one.

Common influencer marketing goals include:

• Attracting more social media followers
• Getting views and increasing brand awareness
• Generating bookings and sales, which you can measure via the influencer’s unique promo code

Paid advertising and promotions

To reach more ambitious social media marketing goals, consider using ads. Even with a small budget, you can create a marketing funnel that attracts new customers and guides them toward a conversion.

With brand awareness campaigns, you can introduce your hotel or travel brand to a new audience and generate interest. Then, you can use remarketing campaigns to target people who have engaged with your brand or content.

However, each social platform requires its own unique strategy. On YouTube, test a mix of vertical short-form video ads and longer in-stream ads. On Facebook and Instagram, experiment with both video and image ads.

Monitor the results closely to measure ad campaign results. In addition to tracking conversions, pay attention to metrics like impressions and clicks.

Based on your findings, iterate on your ads. For example, if your video ads have a lot of views and clicks but few conversions, experiment with another offer or optimize your landing page.

Measuring Success and Adapting Strategies

The best way to confirm whether your social media strategy is successful is to measure the results. Use these guidelines to measure organic results, create social media reports , and adapt your social media strategy.

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

It’s tempting to monitor  all available social media metrics. However, the most important metrics to measure are the ones that align with the goals and KPIs your team set when developing your strategy.

Some of the most useful metrics to measure include:

• Audience growth : Measure follower growth.
• Brand awareness : Monitor impressions, video views, and mentions.
• Engagement : Track likes, comments, shares, and saves.
• Conversions : Measure clicks and conversions like bookings and reservations.
• Return on investment (ROI) : Monitor revenue and ROI from conversions.
• Sentiment : Track positive and negative customer sentiment .

Analyzing social media data

You can certainly monitor metrics for each social profile using native tools. However, checking separate social media platforms tends to be overly time-consuming, especially if you monitor multiple profiles or brands.

With Agorapulse, you can track KPIs for all your social profiles in one place. Our social media management platform tracks everything from audience growth and impressions to engagement and brand awareness. As a result, you can easily see whether you’ve reached your KPIs.

Agorapulse Facebook engagement report

When you connect your brand’s Google Analytics 4 account to Agorapulse, you can track conversions, too. Our social ROI reports show all conversions attributed to social media, including breakdowns by channel, profile, campaign, and even content type. This way, you know exactly how much value your efforts are generating.

Agorapulse ROI report

Since Agorapulse offers competitive reports, you can spot trends and see how your social media performance has changed over months, quarters, or years. With these insights, you can make data-driven decisions to refine your strategy and improve your results.

Continuous improvement

Social media marketing isn’t something you can set up to run in the background without oversight. To succeed with social media, you have to stay on top of trends and aim to keep improving your results.

To monitor trends, follow industry outlets like Social Media Today . It’s also worth following the social profiles and blogs of the platforms your brand uses. For example, the Instagram blog shares announcements and tips.

When new features and content types launch, plan to experiment with them. Some may not work for your audience. But when you find any that do, you can include them in your content strategy.

Don’t forget to keep an eye on the competition. Copying their approach is never a good idea. But they can provide inspiration and give you ideas for approaches to try with your audience.

Final Thoughts on Social Media for Hotel and Travel Businesses

Whether you want to grow your customer base, inspire travel, or book more reservations, a strong social media strategy is key. With a mix of organic and paid content, UGC, and influencer partnerships, you can build relationships with followers, attract loyal customers, and get more business.

To manage these moving parts effectively, you need the right tool. As a complete social media management solution, Agorapulse is the only tool you need. Agorapulse handles everything from scheduling content and managing engagement to social listening and social analytics for all your social profiles.

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Track the performance of your sales agents by the bookings they have sold, the revenue they have brought in, and the up-sells and cross-sells they have made.

Travel marketing and sales connectors

Integrates with all the popular hospitality marketing, sales, telephony and call center apps that you use and love. You can use APIs and customization to connect your inventory solution to LeadSquared as well. Zapier integration allows you to build your custom connectors as well.

Marketing + CRM + Lead management – All in One Place

“Since using LeadSquared, we are able to maintain a higher engagement with our leads with email campaigns and automation. Detailed marketing reports give us an idea of our best performing campaigns. And the best part – it has all the tools we need for marketing, CRM and lead management.”

Schedule your Demo

Know more about LeadSquared travel CRM in a 30 minute online demo.

How much does a travel CRM cost?

LeadSquared’s Travel CRM pricing starts at INR 1250 per user per month. Click here to check what’s all included in the basic plan.

Does LeadSquared’s Travel CRM integrate with any other software that travel planners might use, such as booking systems or accounting software?

Yes, LeadSquared readily integrates with various booking tools, lead generation websites, advertising platforms, cloud telephony, and more.

What are the specific features of LeadSquared Travel CRM that help to automate tasks for package planners?

Performance reporting, task and follow-up reminder notifications, email, WhatsApp campaign creation, lead capture, distribution and management are some of the many tasks that can be automated for package planners.

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