Google ROAS
12x+
north of 12x return on ad spend across our travel accounts
Prepared for Dreamworld
Prepared for Dreamworld
What we found inside Dreamworld's acquisition engine.
Your whole category is spending $677M a year to move people around Australia. You need something narrower and more winnable: a share of the people who have already decided to come to the Gold Coast.
King Claw, Rivertown and Kenny & Belinda's Dreamland are three demand events sitting on your own site right now, and each one behaves differently in paid media than a day ticket does.
$87.8Mthe "Other" bucket
attractions hide in
attractions hide in
The thing that caught our eye
You compete in a category that does not name you.
Of the $677M spent in Australian travel and tourism last year, Airlines, OTAs and tour operators account for more than $500M of it. Theme parks and attractions do not get their own line. You are folded into "Other", the second-smallest slice at $87.8M. That is not a problem, it is the opening. Almost none of that half a billion is bidding against you. It is bidding to get a family onto a Gold Coast flight, and once that booking is made, the "what do we do while we are here" decision is wide open and barely contested.
We've solved thisAcross our travel & tourism accounts we have driven ROAS north of 12x by owning the post-booking window.
Where the category money goes
Half a billion dollars, almost none of it aimed at you.
This is the shape of the spend you sit inside. Airlines and booking platforms dominate because their job is to sell the trip. The attractions slice is small and quiet, which means the real fight for Dreamworld is not against the giants in this chart, it is intercepting demand the giants have already created.
Attractions live inside "Other", the second-smallest pool in the category · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
Timing tells the story
The category peaks in January. Your best moves happen before then.
Travel spend peaks in January and bottoms out in December. Everyone crowds into the summer school-holiday window at the same time, which is exactly when CPMs are worst. December, the trough, is when families are locking in their January plans and gift-card and pass intent is high, and it is the cheapest media you will buy all year.
The month before the peak is the value window everyone skips · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
We can map your ticket and pass demand against this category calendar and show you exactly where you are overpaying for attention. That is a 30-minute conversation, not a project.
Just hit replyWhat you only learn from the inside
Things we know about selling attractions that aren't on any dashboard.
A ride launch is a media event
King Claw creates a demand spike that dwarfs your baseline for about six weeks. If you are spending flat through it, you are leaving the cheapest converting traffic of the year on the table and letting organic soak up demand you could have scaled.
The forecast is a bid signal
Gold Coast same-week intent tracks the weather more tightly than any campaign. Rules that lean spend into a sunny weekend forecast and pull back on a wet one beat a fixed daily budget every time.
The pass is the real asset
Day tickets are a transaction. Annual passes are the LTV engine. The highest-return audience you own is lapsed passholders in the 30 days before their renewal date, and almost nobody times a campaign to it.
Two audiences, two funnels
Locals buy passes and rebook on impulse. Interstate families buy a single day, usually bundled into a trip they booked weeks earlier. Serving both the same creative and the same offer wastes budget on both.
Kids' precincts sell to adults
Kenny & Belinda's Dreamland is not marketed to kids, it is marketed to a parent deciding if the day suits a four-year-old. The creative that converts them looks nothing like a thrill-ride ad, and it needs its own audience split.
Watch the neighbours' launches
When a nearby park drops a new attraction, category CPMs on the Gold Coast spike for everyone. Knowing when to hold spend and let the surge pass, rather than pay the premium, is worth more than any single bid tweak.
One honest comparison
What a sharp travel account actually delivers.
These are our first-party numbers across Australian and New Zealand travel and tourism accounts, kept deliberately loose and rounded. They are the bar we would hold your ticket and pass activity to, not a promise before we have seen your data.
Cost per purchase
Under $20
the strongest accounts sit well below this on ticketed products
Meta CPM
Single digits
achievable even through the January crush with the right timing
Sunny first-party benchmark, travel & tourism, as at Jun 2026. Directional, not spend-weighted.
This is a snapshot, not the plan
A real plan is built on better data than a quick scan.
Everything above we read from the outside. With your ticket, pass and precinct-level data, the picture gets far 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.
1.7x
more ticket revenue from the same media budget
Here is the working. A mid-pack travel account runs somewhere around a 7x return on paid spend. Across our accounts we consistently push past 12x. On the same budget, that is roughly 1.7x more revenue for every dollar you already spend, before you add a cent. Whatever you are currently putting into digital ticket and pass sales, that lift applies straight on top.
Sunny Advertising · Travel & Tourism team