We use customer journey mapping as one of the foundational tools in how we approach digital marketing for travel companies. Understanding why a potential traveller spends twenty minutes on a tour page before leaving without booking, or why they add a holiday to their basket and then disappear, isn’t guesswork — it’s something you can map, diagnose and systematically improve. In this post, we’ll explain what a customer journey map is, why it matters in travel, and how to create one that actually drives better results.
What is a customer journey map?
A customer journey map is a visual representation of the steps your prospective customers take from first discovering your brand to completing a booking — and everything in between. In travel, that journey is rarely short or linear. What we’ve found working with tour operators and activity providers is that the consideration window often runs for months. A traveller might see your brand on Instagram in January while dreaming about a summer holiday, read a blog post in March, compare you against competitors in May, and finally book in June. Each of those touchpoints needs to be understood and designed intentionally.
We use customer journey maps to build a clearer picture of your customers’ intentions, their needs, and the friction points that cause them to drop off. It sounds straightforward, but in practice, getting this right requires combining data from multiple sources — analytics, session recordings, ad click paths, and direct customer feedback.
What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?
Customer journey mapping sits at the heart of any serious conversion rate optimisation (CRO) programme. It breaks the customer journey down phase by phase — awareness, consideration, intent, decision, post-booking — and lets you align each stage with a specific digital marketing goal. For travel businesses facing OTA competition from Booking.com, Expedia and GetYourGuide, this kind of clarity is particularly valuable: you need to understand exactly where prospective customers are comparing you against alternatives, and what they need to see at that moment to choose you directly.
The main benefits of customer journey mapping are:
You can establish a customer persona
Effective journey mapping starts with a well-defined persona. In our experience, travel businesses often have more distinct customer segments than they realise — the solo adventure traveller, the family booking a group tour, the couple planning their first long-haul trip. Each of these has a different decision timeline, different triggers, and different anxieties. Building separate journey maps for each primary persona gives you far more actionable insight than a single generic map.
You can improve your customer service
In travel, the gap between inspiration and booking is filled with questions. Clients often ask us why their live chat or enquiry form isn’t converting — and frequently the answer is that it’s positioned at the wrong point in the journey. A journey map helps you place the right support mechanism at the right moment: whether that’s a destination guide at the research stage, clear departure date availability during consideration, or a payment instalment option at the point of decision.
You can vastly improve customer retention rate
Repeat bookers are significantly more valuable than one-time customers, and we tend to see that operators who invest in the post-booking journey — confirmation emails, pre-departure communications, destination guides — generate notably higher repeat booking rates. The journey map shouldn’t end at the point of purchase. Mapping the post-booking and post-trip experience often reveals straightforward wins that most operators are missing.
Maintain a customer-focused mentality
One underrated benefit of the journey map is its value as an internal alignment tool. When your digital team, sales team and product team all work from the same customer journey map, it becomes much easier to make consistent decisions. In travel, where the booking funnel touches so many channels — paid search, organic, social, email, direct — that alignment matters enormously.
How to create a clear customer journey map
Set your objectives for the map
Be specific about what you’re trying to understand before you start. Are you trying to reduce drop-off at the enquiry stage? Understand why paid traffic isn’t converting? Improve repeat booking rates? Different objectives lead you to focus on different parts of the journey. What we’ve found is that the most useful maps are built around a specific problem, not as a general overview exercise.
Do your research
Good journey mapping is grounded in real data. Pull your Google Analytics funnel reports, review session recordings from Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity, analyse your top exit pages, and look at where paid search traffic drops off versus organic. In travel, seasonality adds an important layer — behaviour in January peak planning season is different to August, so where possible, segment your research by time of year.
Highlight your target customer personas
Once you’ve gathered your data, map it against each of your primary personas. Which segments are showing the longest consideration windows? Where are high-value customers — those booking group tours or longer itineraries — dropping off? This is where the map becomes genuinely actionable: you can start to see which personas need more nurturing at the consideration stage, and which are ready to convert with the right push.
Get in Touch
If you’d like to explore customer journey mapping as part of a wider CRO or digital marketing strategy for your travel business, get in touch with the Summon team. We work exclusively with tour operators, ferry companies, airlines and activity providers, and we’d be happy to discuss how we can help.