Cost per purchase (Google)
under $20
Against a five-figure berth, the acquisition cost is a rounding error. Sunny first-party benchmark, as at Jun 2026.
Prepared for Coral Expeditions
Prepared for Coral Expeditions
What we found inside Coral Expeditions' acquisition engine.
You sell one of the highest-consideration products in Australian travel: a small-ship berth to somewhere most people will only see once. The category around you does not buy media like that product deserves.
Chris, we spent an afternoon reading Coral against the wider travel category. Here is the honest version.
$90.4Mspent by Cruise Lines
in the category last year
in the category last year
The thing that caught our eye
The cruise category still buys media for a brochure sale, not a considered one.
Across the travel category, Cruise Lines put $90.4M to work last year (Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025). The single biggest channel across the whole category is still Newspapers at $208M. That mix flatters a mass, low-consideration sale.
Your product is the opposite. A Kimberley or Sub-Antarctic berth is a five-figure, months-in-advance decision, often researched across many visits before a deposit. That behaviour is exactly what performance digital is built to capture, and it is where the category under-invests relative to how the purchase actually happens.
We've solved thisAcross our travel accounts we have driven ROAS north of 12x on considered, high-ticket itineraries.
Where the category's money sits
The category spends like it's 2005.
$208M in Newspapers, $193M in Digital & Social. For a category selling to an older, affluent audience, print still holds. But the gap between how those two channels are measured is the whole opportunity: one you can attribute to a deposit, one you cannot.
Print and TV still absorb over half the category's spend · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
Who you're really competing with for attention
Cruise is a third of the size of tour operators.
Tour Operators and Agencies spent $183M, OTAs $126M, Airlines $107M. Cruise sits mid-pack at $90M. Every one of those players is bidding on the same "expedition", "Kimberley", "Antarctica" intent you rely on. You do not need to outspend them. You need to outconvert them on the terms that matter to a considered buyer.
Cruise is outspent 2:1 by the tour operator segment · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
We can pull your itinerary intent against the category demand curve and show you where you're leaking bookings to tour operators. That's a short conversation.
Let's talkWhat you only learn from the inside
Things about cruise media that aren't on any dashboard.
Wave season is bid before it starts
Cruise buying concentrates January to March. The teams that win push budget into late December, while everyone else is dark, and own the impression when the planning starts.
Optimise to the deposit, not the balance
Final payment lands months after the deposit. If you let the platform chase the full-value event, you starve the algorithm of signal. The deposit is the conversion that trains the machine.
Sold-out departures burn budget
A finite ship means finite cabins. Retargeting a departure that's already full is money set alight. Cabin inventory should gate the creative, not sit in a spreadsheet apart from it.
Past guests are the lookalike goldmine
Expedition lines have repeat rates most categories dream of. Exclude past guests from cold prospecting, then build your best lookalikes from them. Their booking behaviour is your sharpest audience signal.
The audience is on Facebook, not the Gram
Your buyer skews older and affluent. They are on Meta, but on Facebook feed, not Reels. Creative that reads like a printed brochure underperforms a guest's own point-of-view footage every time.
Itinerary demand is wildly uneven
Kimberley in the dry season sells itself. Spreading spend evenly across the fleet leaves the hard-to-fill shoulder departures under-supported and the easy ones over-served.
One honest comparison
What a considered, high-ticket berth does to the maths.
Here is why cruise economics reward performance spend more than almost any travel sub-category. These are our delivered ranges across travel & tourism accounts, kept deliberately loose.
ROAS delivered
north of 12x
Across our travel accounts, with the strongest itineraries running well above that. Sunny first-party benchmark, as at Jun 2026.
Meta CPM
single digits
Reaching an older, affluent audience on Facebook still clears at single-digit CPMs. Sunny first-party benchmark, as at Jun 2026.
Travel & tourism, by the numbers
The category context, honestly dated.
$677M
Total travel category spend
Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
$90.4M
Cruise Lines segment spend
Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
Jan
Category peak month (wave season)
Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
$193M
Digital & Social, the measurable slice
Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
When the category actually spends
Everyone crowds January. The smart money moves earlier.
The category peaks in January and troughs in December. That means the cheapest attention of the year sits right before the surge, at the exact moment your considered buyer starts planning next year's trip.
The quietest month sits directly before the loudest · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
Three things we'd look at first
Where we'd start, specifically.
01
Re-point conversion tracking at the deposit
If your paid channels are optimising toward final payment or an enquiry form, they are learning slowly. Fire a clean deposit conversion, feed value, and let the algorithm find the people who actually book, not just those who browse.
Track recordCost per purchase under $20 across our travel accounts.
02
Build audiences from your past guests
Your repeat-booking base is the most valuable first-party asset you own. Suppress them in prospecting, build lookalikes off them, and separate the "second voyage" nurture from the cold acquisition entirely.
Track recordROAS north of 12x on considered, high-ticket travel.
03
Weight spend to the hard-to-fill departures
Let the Kimberley dry season sell itself organically and push paid budget behind shoulder-season and newer itineraries. Match media pressure to cabin availability, not to the itineraries that were always going to fill.
Track recordSingle-digit CPMs reaching an older, affluent Meta audience.
This is a snapshot, not the plan
A real plan is built on better data than a quick scan.
Everything above is what we can read from the outside. With your booking and guest data, the picture gets a lot sharper.
Nielsen Ad IntelCategory & competitor ad-spend tracking
Roy MorganAudience & consumer profiling
Google Premier PartnerTop tier of Google agencies
Meta Business PartnerVerified platform access
This briefing is what we can see from the outside. Imagine what we'd build with the data on the inside.
Proof, not promises
Check out our success stories.
We've done this for travel & tourism brands right across Australia. See the campaigns, and the results, for yourself.
Check out our success storiesWhat this is actually worth
Here's the size of the prize.
$1M+
Bookings unlocked by scaling deposit-optimised digital at category ROAS
The lever is simple: with a five-figure berth and a cost per purchase under $20, every incremental dollar of well-structured performance spend returns north of 12x across our travel accounts. Hold that ROAS while you scale a meaningful slice of your current media investment into deposit-optimised search and Meta, and the incremental booking revenue lands in low seven figures. That is the first number we'd chase, because the maths of a high-ticket, high-repeat product rewards it more than almost anything else in travel.
We'll tighten this against your actuals and your average cabin value. The figure moves; the opportunity doesn't.
We take on a limited number of travel accounts each quarter
The next step
Worth an honest conversation?
No deck, no pitch theatre. Fifteen minutes on where your deposit tracking and itinerary spend are actually leaking, and whether the prize above holds against your numbers.
Just hit replyor just reply to the email this came in, I read every one.
This isn't a pitch in disguise. If the numbers say you're already running this tightly, we'll tell you and leave you to it.
- ✓
Your deposit signal
Whether your channels are learning from the right conversion event.
- ✓
The wave-season window
How to own the cheap attention right before the January surge.
- ✓
The prize, pressure-tested
The low-seven-figure number, run against your real cabin value.