Tourism Digital Marketing in 2025: What's Working and What's Not

Tourism marketing has always been seasonal. What's changed in 2025 is that the nature of seasonality has shifted — driven by remote work flexibility, AI-assisted travel planning, and a post-COVID reset in traveller expectations.

The operators we work with who are growing aren't doing more. They're doing the right things at the right time, with the right data to back it up.

The Booking Window Has Changed

Pre-2020, the tourism industry operated on predictable booking windows. International visitors planned 3–6 months out. Domestic visitors booked 2–6 weeks out. You could map your media spend to those curves and hit reasonable efficiency.

That's no longer true.

The share of last-minute bookings (0–14 days) has nearly doubled. This has real implications for how you structure campaigns — you can't rely on long-horizon awareness campaigns converting in the same cycle.

What this means for your campaigns:

• Maintain always-on lower-funnel activity, not just seasonal bursts
• Build remarketing audiences during awareness phases for last-minute conversion
• Use price and availability signals to trigger urgency-based creative

AI Is Changing the Top of the Funnel

This is the shift that's most underappreciated in the industry right now.

Travellers are increasingly starting their research on ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews — not on traditional search. They're asking questions like:

• "What's the best time to visit Queenstown?"
• "Things to do in New Zealand in winter"
• "Best adventure tours for families in NZ"

If your business isn't in the AI's answer, you're invisible at the top of the funnel.

What Is GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)?

GEO is the practice of optimising your content to appear in AI-generated responses. It's different from traditional SEO in several ways:

The businesses showing up in AI answers share common traits: they publish specific, factual content; they're cited by credible third-party sources; and they answer real traveller questions with structured, scannable information.

What's Working in Paid Media

Google: Performance Max Is Maturing

PMax (Performance Max) campaigns have matured significantly. When set up correctly, they now outperform standard Search + Shopping combinations for most tourism clients — but the setup matters enormously.

The difference between "poor setup" and "optimised" PMax is almost entirely in:

1. Asset quality — high-resolution images, multiple headline/description variations, proper video assets
2. Audience signals — seeding PMax with your best converting audiences from historical data
3. Brand exclusions — preventing PMax from cannibalising branded search you'd win anyway

Meta: Creative Fatigue Is Accelerating

Creative fatigue — the decline in ad performance as an audience sees the same creative repeatedly — is happening faster than ever on Meta. Two years ago, a strong creative set might run for 90 days before significant performance degradation. Today, that window is often 3–4 weeks.

Our recommendation: build creative production into your ongoing retainer, not just campaign launches. Tourism businesses with a continuous creative refresh schedule consistently outperform those who launch once per season.

Seasonal Budget Strategy

The biggest strategic mistake we see in tourism marketing is flat budgeting. Equal spend across 12 months makes no sense when demand is anything but equal.

Demand-responsive budgeting — shifting spend to match and slightly lead demand peaks — typically delivers 20–35% better ROAS compared to flat budgeting with the same total annual spend.

The Content Opportunity Nobody Is Taking

Most tourism operators publish blog content to hit an SEO checklist. The result is generic, surface-level articles that rank poorly and convert nobody.

The content opportunity in tourism right now is specific, operational knowledge that only insiders have.

Things like:

• The best time of day to visit a specific attraction (not "morning is best" — actual times, actual reasons)
• How to compare competing experiences for a specific type of traveller
• What to expect at different price points, in honest detail
• Local knowledge that visitors can't get from a tour operator website

This is the content that earns AI citations, builds trust with late-stage researchers, and creates a genuine reason to bookmark and return.

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Want to talk through your tourism marketing strategy? Book a free strategy call — no pitch, just a conversation about where your biggest opportunities are.