Category spend
$677M
Total travel and tourism, as at Dec 2025
Prepared for Ingenia
Prepared for the Marketing Team · Ingenia Holidays
What we found inside Ingenia's acquisition engine.
Two words on your homepage tell us your whole strategy: "Book direct." That is the right fight to pick. It is also the most expensive one in Australian travel right now.
With 30-plus parks across Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, you are sitting on demand that the booking platforms would love to rent back to you.
$126Mspent by OTAs and booking
platforms, as at Dec 2025
platforms, as at Dec 2025
The thing that caught our eye
Your "Book direct" line is a war cry against a $126M budget.
Online travel agents and booking platforms poured roughly $126M into the category last year (Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025). Booking.com, WebJet and TripADeal spend that money to get between a traveller and your parks, then charge you commission to hand the guest back. Every direct booking you win is margin you keep and a first-party relationship you own. The homepage says you know this. The question is whether your media weight backs the ambition.
We've solved thisWe build direct-booking demand that starves the aggregators of your inventory.
Who you are really bidding against
The names competing for the same East Coast getaway.
The travellers browsing your cabins in Ulladulla or a glamping tent up north are the same people the platforms are chasing with far heavier budgets. Here is the spend gap, at category scale.
Direct accommodation brands are near-invisible next to the platforms reselling them · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
When the money moves
The category floods in January. It empties in December.
Travel advertising peaks in January and bottoms out in December (Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025). That is the loudest month to be heard and the quietest month to be missed. But holiday-park bookings are made weeks ahead, so the smart spend lands before the crowd arrives, not inside it.
Everyone shouts in January. The booking decision was made in the quiet before it · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
Want to see where your direct-booking dollar is leaking to the platforms right now?
Book a 30-minute callThe category, split by who spends
The accommodation lane is wide open.
Tour operators and OTAs dominate category spend. Hotels and resorts, the closest neighbour to what you actually sell, spent the least of any group (Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025). That is not a warning. It is a gap. Direct accommodation brands are barely showing up, which means a distinctive Ingenia voice does not have to outspend anyone to stand out.
The people selling rooms are the quietest in the room · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
Straight from your own market
This isn't a template. We looked.
Your Ulladulla park alone lists a splash park, a gym, tennis and basketball courts, a pool and pet-friendly sites year round. That is a genuinely strong product story. The gap is not the parks. It is how few travellers outside your existing database ever see it before a platform intercepts them.
[ Ingenia image ]
One honest comparison
Three numbers worth sitting with.
Category context is real and dated. Your own figures we would confirm together on the call.
OTA and platform spend
$126M
The budget competing to disintermediate you
Your direct-booking share
XX%
We would confirm this with you on the call
Three things we'd look at first
Where we'd start, specifically.
01
Defend the direct booking
Brand and search built to catch the traveller before Booking.com does, so the guest lands on ingeniaholidays.com.au and the commission stays with you.
Track recordWe shift demand from aggregators to owned channels.
02
Buy ahead of the January wall
Weight the spend into the quiet planning window when families lock in summer, not the January scrum when every travel brand is shouting and media costs peak.
Track recordSeasonal media planning that beats auction inflation.
03
Own the accommodation lane
With hotels and resorts spending the least in the category, a distinctive holiday-park voice can build salience cheaply across your three states.
Track recordCategory-defining creative for challenger travel brands.
"Every guest who books through a platform is a customer you paid to acquire twice: once in commission, and again the next time, because the platform kept the relationship."
Sunny Advertising, on the real cost of OTA reliance
This is a snapshot, not the plan
A real plan is built on better data than a quick scan.
We read your homepage and the category numbers. Your booking data, park-level occupancy and repeat-guest rates would sharpen every line above.
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.
We've done this before
Check out what we've done.
What this is actually worth
Here's the size of the prize.
$1.4M+
Directional annual margin recovered from a shift toward direct booking
If a meaningful share of your platform-sourced stays moved to direct, the commission you keep plus the lifetime value of owning that guest relationship compounds fast across 30-plus parks.
Directional only. The real number depends on your current channel split and commission rates, which we would confirm together.
We take on a limited number of teardowns each quarter
The next 30 minutes
Let's pressure-test your direct-booking engine.
Half an hour, no deck. We will walk through what we found and where the platform leakage is likely hiding.
Book a 30-minute callOne call. Specific to Ingenia. No obligation.
This isn't a sales call in disguise. If the numbers say your direct strategy is already tight, we will tell you and leave you with the analysis anyway.
- ✓
Your OTA exposure
Where booking platforms are intercepting demand you have already created.
- ✓
The seasonal buy
How to land spend before the January wall instead of inside it.
- ✓
The open lane
Owning the accommodation voice while hotels and resorts stay quiet.
[ Ingenia image ]
"We looked at Ingenia because the product is genuinely good and the direct-booking ambition is real. That is exactly the kind of brand worth backing with sharper media."
The Sunny Team · Sunny Advertising