Three ways the travel booking journey is changing

Written by James Skellington, Head of Strategic New Business at Force24

I spend a lot of my time speaking to travel businesses about how they’re trying to reach, understand and convert customers. 

And while every business is different, the same challenge comes up again and again: the way people buy travel has changed considerably, but we’re not always changing how we market to them at the same pace. 

There are more places to research, more sources of inspiration and more opportunities to compare than ever before. That creates a much bigger journey between someone starting to think about a trip and eventually making a booking. 

For me, there are three truths travel marketers need to pay attention to. 

 

Truth #1: The journey starts much earlier than we think 

When do you consider someone to be actively looking for a holiday? Is it when they search your website? Check availability? Start looking at dates? I’d argue it’s much earlier. 

ABTA’s latest Holiday Habits research gives us a good indication of just how fragmented inspiration has become. General internet searches are used by 48% of UK holidaymakers for inspiration, recommendations from friends and family by 41%, travel websites and guidebooks by 36%, online forums by 26% and social media by 22%. AI is now used by 8%, doubling in a year, and that rises to 18% among 25–34-year-olds. 

So before someone ever looks like a traditional “lead”, they could have searched a destination, watched videos, read reviews, asked AI to build an itinerary and visited your website several times. 

The interesting bit for marketers isn’t any one of those interactions. It’s what happens when you start connecting them. Here are a few examples: 

• A return visit means something different from a first visit.  

• Repeatedly viewing the same destination means something different again.  

Add an email click, a price check or a particular departure search and you’re starting to see a pattern. That’s where intent becomes interesting. 

 

Truth #2: Interest and intent aren’t the same thing 

This is probably the distinction I find myself talking about most, particularly since we launched The Reality of Buyer Intent, our research into how 2,500 buyers and marketers recognise and respond to buying signals. 

One of the clearest things to come out of that research was just how much of a decision can take shape before someone gives you an obvious signal that they’re ready to buy. And I think that’s especially relevant in travel. 

Someone looking at a holiday to Greece doesn’t necessarily want to book a holiday to Greece. But someone returning repeatedly, comparing resorts, reading reviews and checking particular dates is telling you much more. And travel customers have good reasons to research! This is a considered purchase and a big investment, so they are looking for all the data to build confidence that they are making the right decisions. 

Expedia Group’s global Traveller Value Index found 58% of consumers expected to become more price-conscious, but price isn’t the whole story. 76% said they’d pay more for a hotel with better customer reviews. That tells me something important. People aren’t simply hunting for the lowest price, but they’re looking for enough confidence to make a decision. 

For marketers, the opportunity is to understand when that confidence is building. 

Instead of asking only “What is this person interested in?”, we should be asking “What is their behaviour telling us about how close they are to making a decision?” That’s a very different way to think about segmentation, personalisation and automation. 

 

Truth #3: The booking isn’t the end of the journey 

Travel brands are naturally obsessed with the booking aspect of travel. For the holiday maker it’s the beginning of sorts and for brand it’s the conversion, the revenue and the number we all want to see go up. But I think we sometimes give the booking too much finality. Someone has just trusted you with one of the purchases they care about. 

ABTA’s research found that 65% of people describe holidays as the most important time of the year. More recent ABTA research from June 2026 also found that, despite continued cost-of-living pressures, 64% of people still planned to travel overseas in the following 12 months and 34% expected to spend more on holidays. 

That relationship shouldn’t end with a confirmation email. 

Like I said, it’s a beginning for them and that deserves a build-up! Our messaging needs to focus on logistics like departure, extras, and upgrades. As well as valuable destination content that reassures them, they made the right decision and that is an experience itself. Then keep up with their experience to ensure reviews when they return, future recommendations, and eventually, their next trip. 

There’s a huge opportunity here to think about the customer journey as a cycle rather than a funnel that ends at “booked”. 

What does all of this mean? I don’t think travel marketers need more data as most already have plenty of it. 

The bigger opportunity is getting better at connecting the signals customers are already giving us and understanding what they mean. Because the modern travel journey doesn’t happen neatly inside one campaign, channel or website session – it builds over time! 

The more of that journey we can see, the better we can judge when someone needs inspiration, when they need reassurance and when they’re ready to book. 

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