The one journey that matters in travel marketing:
The customer journey
Do you remember when booking a holiday meant switching on the TV and flicking through Teletext?
It wasn’t quaint. It was slow. Painfully slow.
But it was a perfectly normal way to book a holiday at the time. Alongside thumbing through brochures, popping into a travel agent with an actual shop front or ringing someone on the phone and hoping they picked up.
That was the reality of how holidays were booked and, loosely speaking, “researched”. I use research in inverted commas deliberately, because what passed for research then looks very different to what it means today.
Today, it’s anything but linear. According to Expedia, travellers can visit up to 277 different web pages before booking a trip and even that only tells part of the story. People move between search, social, video, editorial, reviews, influencers, WhatsApp groups, ChatGPT, comparison sites and brand websites, often looping back on themselves more than once. Alongside that sit offline influences too: conversations with friends, recommendations from family, something seen on TV, read in the press, noticed on a poster, or picked up in a brochure weeks earlier.
Paid marketing and the “Doom Loop”
All of which makes the reality of how people choose their holidays feel very different from how marketers often plan it.
We know that travel brands over rely on digital, largely because of pressure to prove short-term ROI. This pressure causes investment to gravitate towards the channels which are closest to conversion i.e. Search ads.
This creates the “Doom Loop”.
Over time, it causes costs to rise. Audiences also tire and brand differentiation dissipates. The response is to push harder at the bottom of the funnel, which only reinforces the cycle.
It’s not a new problem, but unfortunately, it creates another.
Overreliance on paid misses the bigger picture
When the reliance is on paid search, much of the strategy is built on a simplified view of the customer journey. Brands identify people who are “in market”, target them with ads and focus on driving clicks and conversions.
And to be clear, those ads are usually doing exactly what they’re designed to do; they reach people who are actively searching, comparing and close to making a decision.
The limitation is who they don’t reach.
Paid media, by design, largely excludes everyone who isn’t in market at that moment. These are the people who aren’t searching yet, but who might book in six months’ time.
When you look at the journey through a purely digital, in-market lens, much of the customer journey gets left on the table.
What else gets missed when strategy relies on paid media?
The diagram might help to explain: [WARCMultiplier Diagram]
The size of the opportunity
At any given moment, the out-of-market audience is far larger than the in-market one. Performance media is designed to work within that smaller pool. Brand marketing operates across both, reaching people whether they’re actively searching or not. When planning leans too heavily on digital performance channels, brands end up optimising for a narrow group of active buyers while ignoring a much larger pool of future, potential, demand. Growth stalls because it’s limited to who is already searching. It’s fishing in the smallest pond.
How demand is actually created
Performance marketing works best when demand already exists. It’s designed to capture intent, not create it. Brand activity, however, puts in that groundwork earlier. It builds familiarity and desire before someone is actively looking because a lot of influence happens while people are out of market.
However, if that groundwork isn’t done, performance channels have to work harder and activity is expected to try and persuade people who are cold or indifferent, which is when messaging slips into discounts and incentives to push results over the line.
The messy middle
Sitting between out-of-market and in-market is what’s often called the messy middle. This is where people weigh up options and gradually form a shortlist. Performance activity can benefit conversions here, but as consumers bounce between touchpoints, attribution gets messy. Yet this is where familiarity of a brand can take shape through repeated exposure across different channels.
When we worked with the Eden Project, we surrounded holidaymakers with touchpoints throughout their time in Cornwall, at motorway services and beaches, in the press, online and even on formats like fish and chip bags. The aim was to build familiarity before they even thought about visiting. The result was a recovery in visitor numbers and the highest recorded recall for any paid media format used in the campaign.
The multiplier effect
This is the most commercially important part. Stronger brand equity doesn’t just sit alongside performance, it improves it. When both brand and performance work together, conversion rates tend to be more resilient, acquisition costs don’t spike and consumers are less sensitive to price. The mistake we see time and again is treating brand activity as a “fluffy” cost, when in reality it’s what makes performance work more efficiently.
Meeting customers where they are
If customer journey mapping teaches us anything, it’s that brands don’t get to decide where journeys happen, your customers do. If your brand wants to be part of that journey, you have to meet people where they actually are.
That’s where a media-neutral approach is essential, and it’s what we practice here at Bluesoup.
That’s the approach we’ve taken with G Adventures. While already a major player in their category, the focus is about continually introducing fresh ideas, embracing new creative approaches and reinforcing their position as a values-led leader in adventure travel.
Media neutrality has been key to that. Rather than defaulting to a single channel or format, we’re using different media to support different products which appeal to different audiences. Brochures, animated video and exhibitions help bring the experience and purpose of G Adventures to life. Social and content keep their story visible and relevant while an increasing range of paid media helps amplify their message.
Different channels, different roles
Very crudely….
Press can act as a direct response channel but it also plays a powerful role in emotional priming - it can help brands feel credible and established.
TV and out-of-home are memorable, emotionally engaging and carry a level of trust which is impossible to replicate elsewhere.
Digital channels are fast and flexible, allowing brands to respond and reinforce as well as staying present in the messy middle as people compare options.
But a media-neutral approach gives brands permission to use all of these together because different parts of the journey call for different types of influence.
So that’s how we think about mapping customer journeys at Bluesoup. It’s a bit more complicated than ‘awareness’, ‘consideration’, ‘convert’ etc, but it makes sense if you think about it and apply the logic we’ve been talking about in this blog. We follow the consumer, across online and offline environments, and use whatever media makes sense to support the role that moment needs to play.
For us, customer journey mapping means stepping back and asking better questions:
Who are the consumers and how do they consume media?
Where does inspiration actually start?
What builds reassurance at different points?
Which channels carry trust, and which drive action?
And, how does the message need to adapt without losing its emotional core?
If you’re leaning too heavily on paid or wondering whether brand activity could be doing more of the heavy lifting in your campaigns, drop us a message and we'll explore what could work better.
