Google ROAS
north of 12x
Our travel accounts, with strong performers well past 20x. Sunny first-party benchmark, as at Jun 2026.
Prepared for NRMA Parks & Resorts
Prepared for NRMA Parks & Resorts
What we found inside NRMA Parks & Resorts' acquisition engine.
You are competing in the one corner of Australian travel where almost nobody is spending, and that is a gift most operators never get.
Airlines and booking platforms burn hundreds of millions fighting each other. You sell the drive holiday they land on the other side of, and the media around it is wide open.
$25Mspent on Hotels / Resorts
in a $677M category
in a $677M category
The thing that caught our eye
Your category is the quietest room in a loud house.
Australian travel advertisers spent $677M in the year to Dec 2025. Hotels and Resorts, the bucket you sit in, took just under $25M of it. That is less than 4% of the category, against $183M for tour operators and $126M for the booking platforms.
Read another way: the airlines and OTAs are paying to teach Australians to holiday. You get to sell them the accommodation once the intent already exists, in an auction nobody else is crowding.
We've solved thisAcross our travel accounts we buy demand created by bigger spenders and convert it cheaper.
Where the money actually goes
Who is spending, and on what.
The category is top-heavy with tour operators, OTAs and airlines. Accommodation is a rounding error by comparison, which is exactly why a disciplined accommodation brand can own its lane.
Hotels / Resorts is the smallest slice of a $677M category · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
The other people bidding on "holiday"
You are not really fighting these brands. But their money moves your prices.
When the big spenders push hard into a booking window, auction prices and CPMs rise for everyone in travel. Knowing their rhythm tells you when to lean in and when to hold your budget.
The scale gap is the point: you can win on precision, not volume · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
Timing is the whole game
The category peaks in January. That is already too late for you.
Nielsen shows category spend peaking in January and bottoming in December. But a family books a summer holiday park in September and October, not the week they arrive. The peak in the chart is where the money lands, not where the decision is made.
Spend peaks Jan, troughs Dec. The booking decision sits weeks earlier · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
Let us map your booking window against the category spend curve and show you the weeks you are paying peak prices for demand you could have locked cheaper.
Just hit replyWhat you only learn from the inside
Things we know that aren't on any dashboard.
Book early, travel late
Drive-holiday accommodation carries a booking-to-stay gap of weeks. Retarget the family that priced a cabin in September; do not wait for the January rush to reintroduce yourself.
State school terms don't align
NSW, QLD and VIC break on different weeks. A single national campaign wastes budget; staggering by state calendar squeezes more nights out of the same spend.
Long weekends are micro-peaks
Anzac Day, Easter and the June and October long weekends drive short-lead, high-intent searches. These are cheap wins the big spenders ignore because they chase the summer volume.
Flexible cancellation converts shoulder
In the shoulder months the objection is not price, it is weather risk. Leading creative with flexible-change messaging lifts conversion when the family is hedging.
The member list is your cheapest channel
An NRMA membership base is a first-party audience the OTAs would pay a fortune for. Past guests and members convert at a fraction of cold prospecting cost, and you already own the relationship.
Park-level, not brand-level
A search for "holiday park Byron" beats a search for your brand every time on intent. Individual park landing pages, not one national page, is where the cheap conversions hide.
One honest comparison
What "good" looks like in your category.
These are our delivered numbers across Australian and New Zealand travel accounts, trailing twelve months. Kept deliberately loose, but real, and the kind of figure a competitor cannot find online.
Cost per purchase
under $20
On search and PMax, with the best accounts under $10. Sunny first-party benchmark, as at Jun 2026.
Meta CPM
single digits
Sitting comfortably under $8 on Facebook and Instagram. Sunny first-party benchmark, as at Jun 2026.
Three things we'd look at first
Where we'd start, specifically.
01
Build the booking-window calendar, not the peak calendar
Map spend to the weeks families decide, roughly six to ten weeks ahead of each state's school break, so you are buying intent before the auction inflates in January.
Track recordWe time travel budgets to the decision, not the departure.
02
Turn the member base into an audience layer
Past guests and NRMA members should be a matched, retargetable audience feeding lookalikes. This is the lever the OTAs cannot copy because they do not own your relationship.
Track recordFirst-party audiences carry our lowest cost-per-purchase accounts.
03
Go park-level on search
Destination-intent searches convert harder than brand terms. Individual park pages and location-specific campaigns capture the "holiday park near X" demand the big spenders leave on the table.
Track recordGranular geo structure is how we push ROAS past 20x.
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 category and general knowledge. With your booking data and member list, the picture sharpens fast.
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.
2x
the return on your current digital spend, directional
The assumption we are making: a typical travel account we inherit runs somewhere around 6x to 7x ROAS before we rework structure and timing. Our travel accounts sit north of 12x. Whatever you are spending on digital today, moving from the lower end toward that benchmark roughly doubles the revenue that spend returns, without adding a dollar to the budget.
Kate, let's talk · Sunny Advertising