How experience-led search is changing travel booking behaviour

What does experience-led search mean for travel brands? 

For travel brands, experience-led search creates both a challenge and an opportunity. While brands have less control over how consumers discover them, they can still influence consideration across multiple touchpoints. 

As travellers move between marketing touchpoints and their route to purchase becomes more convoluted, understanding what consumers are looking for and how they make decisions is key for marketers to understand these changes and adapt their strategies accordingly. 

What is driving experience-led search? 

The growth of experience-led search may reflect changing consumer preferences. Rather than a sole focus on destinations, consumers are increasingly prioritising due to traveller priorities developing, content and social media personalisation and changing value perception.

The growth of experience-led search may reflect changing consumer preferences. Rather than solely focusing on destinations, consumers are increasingly looking at optimising their time during their travels and going where they can make the most memories with family or friends. Experiences are shaping where consumers decide to travel, partly due to having less disposable income because of rising inflation and the cost of living.

Meaningful travel choices  

Travellers are becoming more aware of where they spend their time and money, with GWI data revealing people looking to purchase a holiday in the next 3-6 months find competitive price and value for money among the most important factors of travel services. 

Value is no longer based on price alone; rather than simply booking a destination, consumers are looking for experiences that align with their interests and what they want to gain from the trip, whether that’s personal interests, time with family and friends, culture or relaxation.  

It is imperative that marketers understand key purchase motivations in consumers. Combining market research with your brand’s digital strategy could be pivotal in identifying what target audiences value most. 

Look at how Fusion works with brands on digital strategy 

Personalisation of content  

GWI data suggests that Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are the platforms most used by consumers when booking holidays. These frequently used platforms have altered how travel inspiration is discovered. Platforms are increasingly personalising content based on user interests, previous engagements and behaviours of interaction.  

This means consumers are exposed to more options of experiences and destinations that match their interests. In turn, consumers will receive recommendations that they may not have considered before, creating new routes to discovery and travel research.  

As personalised content becomes more prevalent across platforms, brands must stay ahead and remain visible in the competitive social media landscape with a personalised content strategy that remains relevant to their audience. 

Explore how Fusion supports brands with content marketing  

Our creative work with Journey Latin America shows how creative assets carefully tailored to a specific platform and audience continue to drive optimisation and maximise performance across channels. 

Check out our creative work with Journey Latin America 

Value-driven decision making  

Travellers have become more selective about where they spend their money due to inflation and rising costs. 

However, consumers still prioritise holidays and are evaluating costs differently. They are more concerned about whether the experience feels worthwhile in comparison to cost, creating longer consideration periods as consumers compare more options to find the trip that is best suited to them. Ultimately, this gives brands an opportunity to reach consumers across more touchpoints in the purchase journey.  

Understanding where brands can reach consumers is key for travel brands. This will help them to ensure their budget is distributed effectively so invested channels invested have the greatest opportunity to convert. Using marketing mix modelling services can help brands understand the role and importance of each channel, determining which marketing channels drive sales. 

Understand how Fusion uses marketing mix modelling to determine the role and importance of marketing channels 

Are travel brands visible during the research journey?

As experience-led search is growing across the travel purchase journey, staying visible is becoming more difficult. This could be due to the following:  

• More discovery platforms  

• Longer research periods  

• Increased competition  

• Experience-led search is hard to predict  

• Non-linear journeys to purchase 

All these contributors are making the travel purchase journey more fragmented, and brands need to be present across more channels than before. It is also becoming increasingly difficult to predict where and what consumers are searching for, making it difficult to capture demand. 

Ensuring travel brands engage with consumers across the whole purchase journey is essential; through the inspiration and consideration stages, brands can shape destination choices, build trust and create a seamless conversion process.  

The 3 stages of the travel consumer journey 

Brands need to focus on each stage of the consumer journey individually and tailor strategy to the stage rather than using the same campaigns across all of them.  

1. Inspiration stage 

This phase is the start of the purchase journey, where travellers first start thinking about booking a trip. Usually, people spend roughly 33 days in this stage of the journey.  

During the inspiration stage, brands should build awareness and shape destination decisions. Often, brands wait to target travellers that have shown interest in their offering; therefore, this is a missed opportunity for many.

This stage offers a chance to boost visibility, showcase activities and experiences that may persuade consumers to factor you into their decision. This stage is not fit for one solution. Often many work well together to drive awareness, but according to Expedia Group’s Path to Purchase study, 65% of travellers use social media for travel inspiration, meaning this is a good opportunity for brands to use social media and create engaging content to boost your presence within the market. 

2. Consideration and research stage  

During the research stage, travellers are weighing up different options to narrow choices using more platforms than before, this stage offers a chance for brands to build credibility further due to consumers using this opportunity to read reviews, compare price and value to narrow down their options. 

During this phase travellers commonly use search engines, meta travel websites and social media, while many also using online travel agents (OTA) regardless of where they book. 

Brand presence is therefore not only key for individual websites and channels but also ensuring your brand is present across OTA’s with relevant accurate information to stay visible on every channel used by the target segment.

During this phase, brands may use targeted search ads, retargeting and personalised messaging to reconnect with interested users, ensure content is accurate to the individual, and show up when travellers are actively searching. 

Our work with Oxford Ski Company drove brand awareness and supported future growth through a multi-touchpoint approach and focused targeting of ads, increasing brand visibility and market position.  

See our paid media work with Oxford Ski Company

3. Conversion stage 

This stage is where travellers will book and purchase the trip. During this stage, consumers want to be convinced they are making the right decision. Brands need to ensure their booking purchase is clear in terms of having readily available information easy to access to prevent any hesitation or friction that would cause travellers to change their mind and pursue an alternative. 

How can travel brands capture experience-led demand? 

To continue capturing demand as it shifts into experience-led rather than destination-led, brands must adapt to the way consumers are being inspired by, discover, compare and purchase travel.  

Success requires brands to understand the motivations consumers are driven by and the channels they are using. From this, creating content that meets their needs ensuring it is experience led and personalised to stay visible alongside competition, this will help build awareness across platforms travellers use including search engines, social media and online travel agencies. 

This should allow brands to reach travellers through all stages of the purchase journey and allow travel brands to use insights to understand which channels influence bookings the most to distribute marketing investment efficiently to deliver activity creating the greatest impact. 

How Fusion helps brands understand the modern travel purchase journey 

As visibility becomes an increasingly difficult task for the travel market, the customer journey becomes convoluted, and the number of marketing touchpoints increase. Travel brands must focus on where their marketing investment is placed and how efficiently it is working. 

Fusion helps brands understand consumer behaviour through market research and audience insight. We combine these insights with content marketing and paid media to help improve visibility at every stage of the consumer journey.  

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Understand how Fusion's paid media services can help your brand stay visible