Across the UK, in kitchens, on sofas and in the glow of late-night scrolling, travel plans are starting to come together.
With the cost of living still biting, a Gen Z traveller holds off booking, watching for the next promotional drop when prices typically move.
After a full-on few weeks at work, a couple fancy a last-minute Easter break and begin browsing, with price quickly becoming the easiest way to narrow options.
Scrolling one evening, a traveller notices the same ads appearing again and again and, when a late deal catches their eye, a booking quickly follows.
But what do all these moments have in common?
They are all examples of travellers booking later and the different pressures driving that behaviour.
Shorter booking windows are now embedded in how many people plan their trips, and for some travel brands, the implications are challenging.
And unfortunately, even if late bookings weren’t affecting you much before, the current situation in the Middle East will likely bring them into sharper focus. The conflict is already putting pressure on destinations, fuel prices and airspace stability. If travellers were hesitating over pricing, safety and disruption, this kind of volatility will only reinforce that behaviour.
Late demand isn’t going away and, in the near term, is likely to become more pronounced.
This isn’t a trend you can just push back against, but there is opportunity in how you respond. It is entirely possible to influence travellers to book earlier, and much of that comes down to how and when you build demand. If late bookings are starting to dominate your mix, or you’re concerned they might, these are the questions worth asking:
1. Are you piling too much of your activity into the peak booking periods?
Are you the kind of brand which has continuous, year-round marketing campaigns designed for constant visibility, brand awareness and consistent lead generation?
Or is your strategy based on short-term, campaign-based bursts?
If it’s the latter, then you’re not alone. Activity being turned on and off around peak booking pushes, promotional bursts and key sales periods is very common in travel marketing.
The instinct “Why spend when people aren’t booking?” is understandable. On the face of it, the logic has some grounding:
- Bookings need to come in now
- Targets are monthly or quarterly
- Performance channels show fast results
- Finance wants visible ROI
Concentrating spend into peak windows can feel efficient because it produces quick, visible conversions. But over time, it pulls demand later and compresses your booking window. And there are a few reasons why this happens:
A. You’re (mainly) reaching travellers when they’re already in shopping mode
When you turn on campaigns before a big holiday, you’re mainly targeting the active searchers, the deal hunters and the last-minute planners who are already on the hunt - people who were close to booking anyway. The outcome is that bookings bunch up to the departure date.
B. You’re not doing enough early on to get on people’s radar
When most of your activity is clustered, activity across the rest of the year is more sparse. That means fewer early opportunities to build familiarity, fewer travellers thinking of you months ahead and fewer feeling confident enough to commit to booking.
C. You train your customers to expect deals
Travellers are a wily bunch, and if you consistently schedule promotions close to holiday periods, they'll start to learn your patterns, like our Gen Z traveller in the intro. They will sit and wait, watch prices and wait for you to drop them. Over time, that behaviour pulls more bookings into the final window, making demand spikier (and more price-sensitive) than it should be.
D. You’re going into peak season with too few people already primed
If most of your campaigns only run during peak periods, you have fewer people warmed up in advance. Fewer people have visited your site, fewer have searched for your brand and fewer are sitting in your retargeting pools.
So when the main booking window opens, you’re starting from a colder base than you could be, which usually means more pressure on last-minute activity.
E. You’re walking straight into the most crowded part of the market
When lots of brands pile into the same peak booking windows, CPCs and CPAs inflate and your ability to differentiate beyond price weakens. Think back to the couple in our intro. With little else to separate the options, price quickly becomes the deciding factor. The net effect is that more demand gets squeezed into the last-minute window, reinforcing the very pressure most travel brands are trying to avoid.
To be clear, we’re not saying clustering campaigns causes late booking on its own, but it reinforces existing late-booking behaviour, does little to counteract it and, in many cases, can end up amplifying the pattern over time.
2. Are you visible early enough to shape traveller preference?
Most people are out of market most of the time. But that doesn’t mean they’re switched off. They’re still scrolling social feeds, watching creator content, reading the press and passing outdoor ads on the way to work. These are all touchpoints where travel plans take root.
If your brand is absent from them, you’re more likely to enter the decision window on the back foot, up against brands that have been building familiarity.
When people don’t have that early familiarity, their shortlists take longer to form and their decisions drift closer to departure. You’ve also got to remember, by the time someone is actively searching, much of their decision is already set and your brand has less time to influence the outcome.
Brands that do show up earlier tend to compete on preference. Brands that arrive late tend to be pulled into price-led competition in the final booking window.
3. Are you meeting audiences where their inspiration starts?
The risk for travel brands is defaulting to the channels which capture demand rather than the environments which help create it. Search and lower-funnel activity absolutely have a role to play, but as we’ve said earlier, on their own, they only reach people once much of the early influence has already happened.
We know that travellers move back and forth between channels in the messy middle of decision-making. Expedia data shows they now spend more than five hours consuming travel content in the 45 days before booking, often visiting well over 100 pages along the way.
We also know that search engines, social media, airline websites and meta travel websites are the top five resources used by most travellers. So if you want to build an effective campaign, you have to follow your customers across the full journey, not force it through a single channel lens.
In our work with Lochs & Glens, we helped them reduce over-reliance on local press by testing a broader media mix to unlock new reach and sales in audiences the brand had previously struggled to engage.
Different environments also play different roles at various moments. For instance:
- Social and creators can seed ideas early
- TV and out of home can build emotional salience and broad reach
- Press and high-quality content environments can add credibility and depth
- Performance channels can then capture the demand that has been building
When these elements work together, brands are far more likely to influence travellers earlier and arrive in the consideration window with momentum already behind them.
If you’ve just joined us, this is part of our late bookings series. Late bookings are becoming a real headache for travel brands, so we’re unpacking the practical levers which help reduce reliance on last-minute demand and smooth bookings across the year.
If you fancy a few more bookings on the board, we’re always happy to help. Get in touch.
