Search ROAS
12x+
north of 12x on high-intent booking search
Prepared for The Sands Torquay
Prepared for The Sands Torquay
What we found inside The Sands' acquisition engine.
You run five businesses under one roof: rooms, a championship links course, Sabbia, a member health club and a weddings and conference calendar. Each one buys its guests differently, and most resorts only market the first.
Annie, this is an outside read built from your site and the category numbers. No login required, and no pitch buried in it.
$25Mspent by all Hotels & Resorts
in the category last year
in the category last year
The thing that caught our eye
The people who own your guests spend seven times more than the people who own your rooms.
Across the $677M travel category, Hotels and Resorts is the smallest advertiser at roughly $25M. OTAs and booking platforms spent about $126M, and tour operators and agencies close to $183M (Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025). That gap is not a coincidence. The intermediaries outspend you because they resell your rooms back to your own guests and take a margin on every night.
For a property like The Sands, with a direct phone number, a house restaurant and a golf course an OTA can never bundle, that is the single most fixable leak in the model.
We've solved thisAcross our travel accounts we push high-intent demand to the direct booking path, not the OTA's.
Where the category money actually goes
The spend map, and where you sit on it.
This is every dollar in the category, split by who is spending it. Hotels and Resorts is the thin slice. The fat slices are the middlemen bidding on the exact traveller already planning a Surf Coast weekend.
The intermediaries outspend accommodation owners roughly 12 to 1 · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
Want to see how much of your room revenue is currently walking out through OTA commission before it hits your P&L?
Let's talkTiming
The category goes quiet exactly when you need heads in beds.
Category spend peaks in January and bottoms out in December (Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025). Read that again: the whole category floods the auction in January when the Great Ocean Road is already full, and pulls back in the run-up. The cheapest, least contested window to lock in your summer bookings sits in the quiet months before everyone else arrives.
Book demand ahead of the January auction crush, not inside it · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
What you only learn from the inside
Things we know about resort media that aren't on any dashboard.
Bid on your own name
OTAs run ads on "The Sands Torquay" and intercept guests who already chose you. Owning your brand search costs cents and quietly steals the commission back.
Dog-friendly is a goldmine niche
"Dog friendly accommodation Great Ocean Road" is low-volume, sky-high intent and barely contested. Those searchers book direct and rarely price-shop. It is one of your cheapest room-nights to buy.
The golf course is a separate funnel
Members and green-fee visitors behave nothing like transient hotel guests. Feeding them the same accommodation creative wastes both budgets. Two audiences, two engines.
Weddings run on an 18-month clock
Conference and wedding enquiries convert far slower than a room booking. If you measure them on last-click ROAS they always look like they lose money, so they get starved. They shouldn't be.
The health club is your retention list
Local members are already a warm, opted-in audience. They are the cheapest people on earth to sell a Sabbia dinner or a family staycation to, and almost nobody markets to them.
Melbourne is a two-hour drive audience
Your best midweek fill isn't interstate flyers, it's a Melbourne couple deciding on a Wednesday. That audience is buyable by geo and postcode, not by generic "travel" targeting.
Three things we'd look at first
Where we'd start, specifically.
01
Defend the direct booking path
Own every branded search, tighten the "Book Accommodation" journey, and give guests a reason to skip the OTA (best-rate guarantee, dog package, dining credit). Every night recovered is full-margin.
Track recordAcross our travel accounts we've driven ROAS north of 12x on high-intent search.
02
Run the quiet-season window
Buy demand in the low-competition months before January, when CPMs are soft and the category has pulled back. Lock summer bookings before the auction gets crowded.
Track recordWe've held single-digit CPMs on Meta across travel accounts by buying ahead of the crowd.
03
Split the five engines
Rooms, golf, dining, health club and events each get their own audience, message and measurement window. Stop letting slow-converting weddings drag down the room ROAS number.
Track recordWe've driven cost per purchase under $20 by matching creative to intent, not averaging it.
One honest comparison
What good looks like in travel media right now.
These are our delivered results across Australian and New Zealand travel and tourism accounts over the last year. Kept deliberately loose, but real, and the kind of numbers an OTA never has to share with you.
Cost per booking
Under $20
at the sharp end of our accounts
Meta CPM
Single digits
by buying the quiet windows
Sunny first-party benchmark, 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.
Give us your booking mix and channel data and this outside read becomes a costed roadmap.
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.
$150K+
Commission recovered per $1M of room revenue shifted off the OTAs
The lever is your OTA mix. Booking platforms charge roughly 15% on every night they sell for you, so for every $1M in room revenue currently flowing through an OTA, about $150k is margin you never see. Move even a share of that back to direct through owned brand search and a better booking path, and it drops straight to your bottom line at close to full margin. That is the first number we'd chase, because it costs cents to defend and compounds every season.
We'll tighten this against your actual booking mix. The figure moves with your OTA share; the opportunity doesn't.
One Surf Coast resort per season
The next step
Let's find out how much margin your OTAs are holding.
Fifteen minutes on your booking mix and we'll show you the direct-booking number worth chasing first.
Just hit replyor just reply to the email this came in, I read every one.
This isn't a pitch in disguise. If the honest answer is that your direct channel is already tight, we'll tell you and leave you the read to keep.
- ✓
Your OTA leak, sized
What the commission is actually costing you against your own mix.
- ✓
The five-engine split
How we'd separate rooms, golf, dining, health club and events.
- ✓
The quiet-season play
The buying window to lock summer before the January crush.