The 50 Travel Marketing Commandments

We've spent years running growth for tour operators, from small-group specialists to long-haul escorted tours. These are the principles we keep coming back to when we're deciding where the money goes. Some we learned the expensive way.

They're written for the person who owns a tour operator's marketing budget, not the person who builds the campaigns. Where there's more to say, we've linked to it.

Strategy and positioning

Decide what you're the best choice for, then own it. You can't out-shout the OTAs on "holidays". You can be the obvious answer for small-group walking holidays in Crete, or escorted tours of Japan. How we build a travel strategy.
Compete with the OTAs on what they can't copy. They win on choice and price comparison. You win on expertise, trust and the trip itself. Spend where that matters.
Every direct booking you win is margin you keep. Commission paid to an OTA or a travel agent is a marketing cost too. Count it when you decide what direct marketing is worth.
Know the market, not just your own numbers. When competitors merge, fold or cut back, the cost of winning a customer changes. The package holiday market is consolidating, and your plan should reflect it.
Brand and performance are one budget, not two. Brand makes performance cheaper. Cutting it to hit this quarter's target is how next year gets expensive.
Your brand voice is a commercial asset. In a market where everyone sells the same sunshine, the way you sound is part of why people book. Defining it properly.

Demand and seasonality

Plan for when people book, not when they travel. Summer sun sells in January. Ski sells the autumn before. We build every client's plan around their booking dates, not their travel dates.
January is not as clever as it looks. Most of what lands in January was set in motion months earlier, by a brochure, a friend's photos or a price someone's been watching. We always ask what January actually added. Here's how we measure it.
Create demand before you try to capture it. Search harvests interest that already exists. If nobody's planting it in the autumn, there's less to harvest in the new year.
Treat world events as a planning input, not a surprise. One news story can move travel search overnight. We track UK holiday search every week, and we watched it happen with the Middle East conflict. Have a plan for moving budget when it does.
Forecast in ranges, not single numbers. Travel demand swings with the weather, the news and the economy. A plan with a best and worst case lets you act fast instead of re-planning from scratch.

Budgets and investment

Fund the peak before it arrives. Money spent once demand has already peaked mostly buys bookings you'd have got anyway. Bidding systems need time to learn, so the budget has to be there first.
Don't split the budget evenly across twelve months. Your customers don't book evenly, so don't spend evenly. Phase it from last year's booking curve. Managing a travel ad budget.
Let budget follow margin, not revenue. A £6,000 escorted tour and a £900 city break don't deserve the same cost per booking. Tell your systems what each booking is worth to you. Conversion values.
A great ROAS can still lose you money. Revenue isn't profit. Set targets on margin and lifetime value, not just on return on ad spend. Using ROAS properly.
Fix the leaks before you add fuel. If the account or the website is wasting money, more budget just wastes it faster. We'll audit your account for free.
Keep a slice of budget for testing. If every pound has to hit target this month, you'll never find next year's growth.

Search

Protect your brand name, but at the right price. The OTAs will bid on your name. Cover it, but don't let brand spend hide how well the rest of the account is really doing. How we run travel PPC.
Fight for the searches where you deserve to win. Your destinations, your trip types, your niche. Broad terms are usually an OTA's game. Building the strategy.
Put the price in the ad. Most travel ads in the market lead with price, and when we test it for clients it usually earns its place. On high-ticket trips it does a second job too: it puts off people who were never going to book. How we tested it for Wightlink.
Automation is a tool, not a strategy. We use plenty of it, but algorithms do exactly what you tell them, which isn't always what you meant. The thinking still has to come from people. Why people still matter.
Give Performance Max a brief, not a blank cheque. Without the right goals and signals it chases whatever's cheapest, which is rarely what you need. Getting Performance Max right.
Search and SEO are one plan. What converts in paid search tells you what's worth ranking for, and every page that ranks is one you don't have to keep paying for. PPC and SEO together.
Market departures, not just destinations. A tour that's half full six weeks out needs a different plan from one that's nearly sold. Let departure loads decide where the budget goes, and stop spending on dates that will sell anyway. How we run travel PPC.

Content and SEO

Write what the OTAs can't. They can't write like someone who's been there. You can, and we help clients turn that knowledge into pages that rank. SEO for travel.
Answer the questions people ask while they're still deciding. "Best time to visit Crete", "is Rhodes good for families". Be useful early and you're the brand they trust when it's time to book. Using search intent.
Build fewer, better pages. One genuinely helpful guide beats twenty thin ones. Google rewards depth, and so do customers.
Earn attention you can't buy. Coverage from travel writers and genuine links come from having something worth talking about, not from asking nicely. Blogger outreach.
Get ready for AI search now. More people ask an assistant where to go before they ever see a search result. Clear, expert, well-structured content is what those answers are built from.
Your website is a long-term asset. Look after the pages that already earn traffic, and when a tour ends, redirect it rather than throwing away what it built. Technical SEO.

Social is where demand starts. Someone sees Santorini on Instagram in October and searches for it in January. Plan the two together. How search and social work together.
Never judge high-impression activity on clicks. Social, video and display work on people who see the ad and book later. We use post-view conversions and media mix modelling to show what they're really worth.
Sell the feeling, not the itinerary. Nobody falls in love with a list of inclusions. Video and real traveller stories do that job.
Run social on the booking calendar, not the travel calendar. Talk about summer in winter, when people are deciding. Planning the calendar.
Plan direct and trade together. If travel agents sell your tours too, your marketing drives their bookings as well. Decide which customers each channel is for, and don't end up bidding against your own partners.

The customer journey

Nobody books a holiday on the first click. In the accounts we run, people come back, compare, ask their partner and come back again. Map that journey before you judge anything.
Never judge a campaign on the day of the click. Across our clients, people usually take somewhere between two and six weeks from first search to booking. Your attribution window needs to be at least that long.
Your bookers are not your prospects. Once someone has paid, take them out of your remarketing and put that budget into people still deciding. Then talk to bookers differently: pre and post-tour extensions, upgrades, next year's trip.
Different travellers, different journeys. Families, couples and solo travellers plan differently and book differently. Strategy that treats them as one audience suits none of them. Planning by traveller type.
The cheapest booking is the repeat one. Past travellers already trust you and know your guides. Make sure they hear about next season before your competitors reach them.
Make booking easy, wherever it happens. Clear prices, sensible deposits and simple payment plans remove the biggest reasons people hesitate on a big-ticket tour. Online, on the phone or through a brochure, every extra hurdle loses people to someone easier. Building a CRO plan.

Data and measurement

Own your customer data. As cookies disappear, the brands with their own first-party data will keep their targeting and their measurement. Everyone else is guessing. Why first-party data matters.
Track every way people book with you. If customers call or request a brochure, those are conversions, and without call tracking your best campaigns can look like your worst. If you're online only, track every step of the booking flow instead.
Fix your tracking before you trust anything. Every decision sits on top of your data. If the foundation is wrong, so is everything built on it. Tag Manager setup.
Last click is a useful number and a terrible boss. We use it every day, but we never let it decide a budget. It undervalues everything that creates demand. Attribution, explained.
Set next year's budget with a model, not a hunch. We build media mix models for our clients that show what each channel actually adds, so they can move money with confidence. Audience measurement.
Report on bookings and profit, not clicks. If a report leads with impressions and click-through rate, it's telling you about activity, not results. The KPIs that matter.

Partners and agencies

Hire specialists, not generalists. Travel has its own seasons, margins and booking behaviour. An agency that also sells sofas and software is learning on your budget. Choosing a travel agency.
Expect an agency to challenge you. If they only ever agree with you, you're paying for hands, not thinking.
Judge partners on what they change, not what they report. A good agency should be able to tell you what's different because they're involved, in bookings and in profit.