Long, multi-device research journeys, heavy booking abandonment, and personalisation that has to reflect live availability and price rather than yesterday’s segment.
Travel has the longest and least linear research journey in consumer marketing. Someone browses on a phone at lunchtime, researches on a laptop that evening, compares on three OTAs, disappears for a fortnight and books on a tablet. Any measurement approach that assumes a single device and a short window will misread almost every booking.
It also has a personalisation problem that most sectors do not: the thing you are personalising changes by the hour. A segment built yesterday is worthless if the property is now sold out or the fare has moved. Travel personalisation has to reach live inventory and pricing, not a nightly export.
And the price is not marketing’s to promise. Revenue management sets it, distribution moves it across channels, and a personalisation programme that ignores either will show a guest a rate that no longer exists. The good programmes are built with revenue management in the room, not presented to them afterwards.
Anyone whose customer researches for weeks, books somewhere else, and then turns up as a stranger.
Research and booking routinely happen on different devices, weeks apart. Without durable first-party identity, the booking looks like a brand new visitor and every campaign that contributed to it goes uncredited.
Most travel sessions end without a booking, and that is normal rather than a failure. The commercial question is which abandoners are genuinely recoverable and what to send them, which needs intent signals rather than a blanket reminder to everyone who saw a search results page.
Recommending a sold-out room or a fare that has moved is worse than not personalising. The decisioning layer has to read live availability and price, which rules out approaches built on overnight segment refreshes.
Bookings made through an intermediary usually arrive with little or no usable customer data, so a meaningful share of your guests are effectively anonymous. Shifting mix towards direct is a data strategy as much as a commercial one.
On Google Hotel Ads and the metasearch engines, your direct rate sits in the same auction as the OTAs selling your rooms. Without rate parity discipline and a clear view of direct booking value net of commission, hotels routinely pay to lose a booking to an intermediary, then pay the intermediary’s commission on top.
The research cycle is long and the answers tend to be short.
The Martech & Adtech Health Check reviews your identity, tracking, abandonment and personalisation set-up against how guests actually research and book, and hands back a prioritised plan. Stack Teardown from £1,950, full Health Check from £6,500.
Standard ad platform windows will not do it. It needs durable first-party identity so returning visitors are recognised, event data warehoused long enough for the full journey to be reconstructed, and a measurement approach, usually media mix modelling or incrementality testing, that does not depend on cookie-based attribution surviving six weeks.
