Data-Led Travel Marketing Checklist

Consumers have become more aware of the ways digital platforms harvest and monetise their data. This has resulted in a move by legislators to reign in the use of data without consent. New laws are being introduced in the UK, Europe, and North America to regulate consumer data usage. These laws will directly affect the way travel brands handle customer data.

Additionally, the leading platforms are figuring out how they will balance privacy considerations against the needs of their advertisers to target users effectively.

TikTok grew rapidly during the time the travel industry was mostly dormant. To keep up with TikTok’s growth, all other platforms introduced new vertical video formats – Instagram launched Reels, YouTube introduced Shorts – and these formats are becoming more popular than traditional in-feed content. Live shopping also became a thing.

All these changes impose additional creative requirements for new vertical video ad formats.

Google officially announced that Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits and will permanently shut down in July 2023. You need to migrate to GA4 before the deadline, and you risk losing valuable data about historical visitors and booking journeys if you don’t act fast.

‘Third party’ cookies are created by domains other than the one a user is visiting. These are often used for advertising purposes. For example, if a user clicks on an ad on Instagram to make a hotel booking on your site, Meta uses third-party cookies to know what action the user took on your website.

When Chrome phases out third-party cookie support, almost nobody will be using a browser that supports them. The degradation of cookie support has major implications for conversion tracking in performance marketing campaigns.

While the difficulties of the pandemic put a number of travel and hospitality firms out of business, many that survived have come through with depleted marketing budgets. Add to that, the current political problems and soaring inflation are making consumers tighten their purse strings. This means you face increased competition to reach a shrinking audience, and have a smaller budget to work with.

For restricted budgets to deliver better results, you need to ensure your tracking and audience targeting are on point.