Tourism Marketing Agency: What to Look For (And What to Avoid)

The tourism marketing agency market is saturated with generalists who added “travel” to their service page. They run the same Facebook ads template for hotels that they use for dentists. The strategy deck looks identical — just with different stock photos.

Finding an agency that genuinely understands tourism marketing requires knowing what to look for and, more importantly, what to run from.

What Tourism Marketing Actually Requires

Travel isn’t like other industries. The buying cycle is longer, the research phase is more complex, and seasonality dictates everything from content strategy to ad spend allocation.

A tourism marketing agency needs to understand:

The Booking Funnel Is Months, Not Minutes

Someone buying shoes makes a decision in minutes. Someone booking a $5,000 family holiday makes a decision over weeks or months. They research destinations, compare properties, check reviews across multiple platforms, ask friends, bookmark options, and come back repeatedly before committing.

Your marketing needs to be present at every stage — not just the final booking moment. An agency that only runs bottom-funnel conversion ads is missing 90% of the journey.

Seasonality Isn’t Optional

Tourism demand follows predictable patterns, but those patterns vary wildly by market, destination, and experience type. Ski resorts peak in winter. Beach resorts peak in summer. City hotels have corporate weekday demand and leisure weekend demand.

Your agency needs to plan content, ad spend, and SEO strategy around these cycles — shifting budget to where demand is, not spreading it evenly across 12 months.

OTAs Are the Elephant in the Room

Any tourism marketing agency that doesn’t have a strategy for reducing OTA dependency isn’t worth hiring. OTAs take 15-25% of every booking. A good agency builds your direct booking channel to reduce that commission drain.

If the agency’s entire strategy feeds into OTA visibility rather than building your own digital presence, they’re working for Booking.com — not you.

Visual Content Is Non-Negotiable

Travel is sold visually. Nobody books a hotel based on a text description alone. Your marketing needs high-quality imagery, video content, and user-generated content strategy.

An agency that focuses purely on technical performance without addressing content quality will hit a ceiling quickly.

Red Flags: Agencies to Avoid

”We Specialise in Travel (And 47 Other Industries)”

If the agency’s website lists every industry imaginable, they don’t specialise in any of them. Tourism expertise means understanding booking engines, OTA channel management, seasonal demand patterns, and destination marketing — not just knowing how to spell “hospitality.”

Reporting on Vanity Metrics

An agency that reports on impressions, reach, and followers without connecting those metrics to bookings is hiding poor performance behind big numbers.

The metrics that matter for tourism: cost per booking, direct booking percentage, organic revenue, and return on ad spend. If the agency can’t report on these, they’re not tracking what matters.

No Understanding of OTA Dynamics

Ask the agency how they approach OTA commission reduction. If they stare blankly or say “that’s not really our area,” walk away. OTA strategy is central to tourism marketing — it’s not a niche concern.

Long-Term Contracts With No Performance Guarantees

Tourism marketing should produce measurable results within 90-120 days. Agencies that require 12-month minimum contracts with no performance milestones are optimising for their revenue, not yours.

Templated Strategies

Ask to see a sample strategy or case study. If the approach looks generic — “we’ll run Google Ads, do some SEO, and post on social media” — it’s a template, not a strategy.

A real tourism strategy should address: which markets you’re targeting, what the seasonal content calendar looks like, how you’re reducing OTA dependency, what specific keyword clusters you’re going after, and how paid and organic channels work together.

What Good Tourism Marketing Looks Like

Integrated Channel Strategy

SEO, paid search, social media, email marketing, and content strategy should work together — not as separate silos managed by different people who never talk.

Example: A blog post about “best time to visit Queenstown” (SEO play) generates email subscribers. Those subscribers receive seasonal offers (email marketing). Retargeting ads follow up with people who read the post but didn’t subscribe (paid media). The post links to specific packages (conversion optimisation).

Every channel feeds the others. Nothing operates in isolation.

Data-Driven Seasonal Planning

Good agencies use historical booking data, search trend data, and competitive intelligence to plan campaigns 3-6 months ahead of demand.

They’re writing summer content in January, building remarketing audiences in spring, and scaling ad spend in the weeks before peak booking periods — not reacting to demand after it’s already arrived.

Revenue-Focused Measurement

Every marketing activity should connect to revenue. Not eventually, not theoretically — directly and measurably.

This means:

UTM-tagged everything
Conversion tracking on direct bookings
Revenue attribution by channel and campaign
Regular reporting that shows marketing spend vs. booking revenue generated

Local Market Knowledge

Tourism marketing varies dramatically by market. Marketing a ski resort to Australians is different from marketing it to Europeans. Different search behaviour, different booking platforms, different content expectations.

An agency should either have experience in your specific markets or be transparent about needing to learn them. Generic “global” strategies rarely work for tourism.

The Question to Ask Every Agency

Here’s the one question that separates genuine tourism marketing expertise from pretenders:

“How would you structure a content strategy to reduce our OTA commission spend by 15% within 12 months?”

A good answer involves direct booking incentives, branded search defence, email capture strategy, content that targets booking-intent keywords, and a measurement framework for tracking the shift from OTA to direct.

A bad answer involves “building your brand” and “increasing social media presence.”

How We Approach Tourism Marketing

We’re not a traditional tourism marketing agency. We don’t do social media management, brand campaigns, or influencer partnerships.

What we do: build the digital infrastructure that drives direct bookings through organic search. SEO that targets booking-intent keywords. Technical optimisation that makes your site faster and more convertible. Content strategy that positions you as the authority for your destinations.

The result: less OTA dependency, more direct revenue, and a marketing channel that compounds over time instead of resetting when ad budgets stop.

See our travel & tourism approach — or get a free audit to see exactly where your tourism marketing is leaking revenue.