Building a PPC strategy for a travel business isn’t the same as building one for an e-commerce shop or a SaaS product – and treating it like it is will cost you. Travel buyers research for weeks, sometimes months. They start with broad destination searches, move through itinerary comparisons and operator research, and often visit your site three or four times before they enquire. A strategy that doesn’t account for that journey will burn budget at the wrong moments and measure the wrong things.
Before anything else, get clear on what you’re actually trying to achieve – and be specific. “More bookings” isn’t a strategy; it’s a hope. Are you trying to build recognition for a new destination you’ve added? Drive enquiries for peak summer departures during the January planning window? Recover ground in a destination where an OTA has started dominating the top of the SERP? The answer shapes everything from campaign type to bidding approach to the keywords you actually buy.
Understanding your audience
Understanding your audience in travel PPC means thinking beyond demographics. Age and household income matter, but what matters more is where in the booking journey someone sits. A search for “best time to visit Vietnam” is fundamentally different from “small group Vietnam tour 12 days” – even if both searches come from the same person, separated by six weeks.
We tend to see tour operators make the mistake of pouring budget into broad awareness terms and wondering why their CPAs are sky-high. In most cases, the issue isn’t the keywords – it’s that they’re bidding the same way on dreaming-phase traffic as they are on booking-intent traffic. Separate your campaigns accordingly: inspiration and destination content can support brand building at the top of the funnel; destination + tour type + departure year queries are where your conversion budget should be focused.
It’s also worth mapping your audience intent to your seasonal calendar. January is peak planning season for summer sun – it’s when most UK long-haul summer holidays are researched and booked. October and November see ski and winter sun searches climb sharply. If your audience targeting doesn’t reflect those windows, you’re either spending too much in quiet periods or showing up under-funded when demand is highest.
Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is a legitimate PPC objective for tour operators – particularly those launching new destinations or trying to build presence in categories where OTAs and aggregators currently dominate. The challenge is measuring it honestly. Awareness campaigns don’t generate direct bookings; they reduce your cost per booking from other channels over time by warming up audiences before they reach the high-intent stage.
Display and YouTube campaigns work well here – visually rich destination content that reaches people before they’re searching with intent. The targeting should be interest-based and in-market: Google’s travel segments (international travel, adventure travel, luxury travel) let you reach people already in a travel-thinking mindset, without paying the premium that comes with competing on high-intent search terms.
One thing we’ve found particularly effective for smaller operators: brand awareness campaigns in the specific destination categories where your expertise is strongest. If you’ve been running Kenya safaris for 20 years, targeted display activity in the “Africa safari” interest category – even at a modest budget – builds recognition with the audience that will eventually search for you specifically.
Leads
In travel, a “lead” means an enquiry – and enquiries are not bookings. The gap between the two matters enormously for how you measure and optimise your campaigns. Clients often ask us why their conversion rate looks healthy in Google Ads but their booking numbers don’t reflect it. The answer is almost always that they’re optimising for enquiry volume without tracking what happens downstream in the sales process.
When lead generation is your objective, your PPC campaign should do two things: attract the right kind of enquiry (qualified, genuinely interested, roughly matching your typical customer profile) and make the next step as frictionless as possible. In travel, effective lead capture mechanisms include brochure requests, “Plan my trip” forms, quote requests, and – for high-value or bespoke tours – a discovery call booking. The CTA you use should match the complexity of your product: “Get a quote” works for a fixed-departure tour; “Tell us about your trip” works better for a tailor-made operator.
Sales
For tour operators who take direct online bookings – particularly those selling fixed-departure tours with clear pricing – direct sales campaigns are the most measurable and the easiest to optimise. These campaigns should target high-intent queries: specific destination + tour type + departure year, or branded searches from people who already know your name.
What we’ve found plays well in travel sales ads: guaranteed departure callouts, early-bird availability flags, group size guarantees (“last 4 places remaining”), and price anchoring when you can show genuine value against OTA listings. One thing to be cautious of: bidding on OTA-style terms (e.g. “cheap tours to [destination]”) when your positioning is quality and expertise. You’ll attract clicks from the wrong audience and pay for the privilege.
Remarketing
Remarketing is one of the most powerful tools available to tour operators in PPC – and it needs to be configured with travel’s long consideration window in mind. The standard 30-day remarketing window that works fine for e-commerce is often too short for travel. Someone researching a Kenya safari in January may not be ready to enquire until March. A 90- or 180-day window keeps your brand visible throughout that research period.
The most effective remarketing approach we’ve seen for tour operators uses audience segmentation: people who visited a specific destination page get ads for that destination; people who started but didn’t complete an enquiry form get a direct response ad with a clear next step; people who downloaded a brochure get nurture-focused ads that address common objections. Broad remarketing to all site visitors is better than nothing, but segmented remarketing is dramatically more effective.
What are repeat sales?
Repeat bookings are genuinely undervalued in travel PPC strategy. A past customer who had a great experience is far easier to convert than a cold prospect – and in many cases, they’ll book a higher-value trip second time around. PPC can support repeat business through carefully targeted campaigns that reach past customers with new departures, new destinations, or seasonal offers.
The key is exclusion as much as targeting: make sure your prospecting campaigns exclude past customers (so you’re not paying to re-acquire someone who already knows you), and that your repeat-sale campaigns reach the right segment (someone who booked a Kenya safari is a better lookalike target for Tanzania than for Japan). A clean CRM list uploaded as a Customer Match audience is the foundation for doing this well.
Get in touch
If you’re an operator looking to build or rebuild your PPC strategy – whether you’re starting from scratch or trying to understand why your current setup isn’t performing – we’re happy to take a look. We work exclusively with travel businesses, so we understand the specific pressures: OTA competition, seasonal demand curves, long booking windows, and the challenge of measuring campaigns that convert over weeks, not days. Get in touch with the team here.