The travel industry is one of the most competitive categories in Google Ads — OTA budgets dominate the auction on high-volume destination terms, and independent tour operators need a carefully structured PPC strategy to compete effectively. In our experience, the operators who get the best results from paid search are those who focus their strategy around the specific moments and audiences where they can genuinely win. Here’s how to approach it.
When a user is looking for a particular type of holiday, they’ll be searching for a specific term. The question is: how do you ensure your business appears before your competitors when they search?
Target audience
Understanding your audience is the foundation of any PPC strategy. For tour operators, this means knowing your primary traveller profiles: solo adventurers, families booking activity holidays, couples planning a first long-haul trip, experienced travellers looking for escorted specialist tours. Each profile searches differently, converts differently, and responds to different ad copy. We tend to build audience segmentation into campaign structure from the outset — separate campaigns for different trip types attract different audiences, and the ad copy that converts a family looking for a safari is different from what converts a solo traveller searching for a small group trekking tour.
Search intent and keywords
When people search for a specific type of holiday, they’re typically somewhere in the consideration or decision stage — particularly for higher-value and longer-haul trips. Keyword strategy for travel should distinguish between commercial intent searches (where someone is ready to compare operators and prices) and informational searches (where someone is still in early research mode). Clients often ask us why their travel PPC campaigns are generating traffic but not enquiries — and a keyword strategy that mixes informational and transactional terms in the same campaigns, without separate landing pages for each intent, is frequently the answer. Build your core campaigns around transactional, high-intent search terms and handle informational queries through content and organic SEO.
Seasonality
Travel PPC is inherently seasonal, and your strategy needs to reflect that explicitly. January and February represent the most significant peak planning window for summer departures — search volume for many destination and tour type terms peaks sharply, and competition from OTAs intensifies. Budget allocation should be higher during this window and during the October-November pre-ski season. What we’ve found is that travel advertisers who treat their PPC budget as a flat monthly spend leave significant performance on the table: concentrating budget during peak planning periods consistently produces better return than even allocation throughout the year. Build a seasonal budget plan that reflects when your prospective customers are actively making booking decisions.
Get in touch
If you’d like to discuss a PPC strategy for your travel business, get in touch with the Summon team. We work exclusively with tour operators, ferry companies, airlines and activity providers.