Google ROAS
12x+
Search and PMax, destination intent captured before the OTAs bid it up.
Prepared for Thredbo Resort
Prepared for Thredbo Resort
What we found inside Thredbo's acquisition engine.
You sell a product whose availability you cannot promise. That single fact should shape where every marketing dollar goes, and in the Australian travel category most resorts still spend as if it doesn't.
The "buy online early and save up to 50%" banner running across your site right now isn't a discount play. It's the smartest weather hedge in Australian tourism, and we think you can push it harder.
$25Mthe entire Hotels & Resorts category ad spend, of $677M total
The thing that caught our eye
You own the mountain, but the category buys the flight.
Of $677M spent advertising travel in Australia last year, Hotels and Resorts accounted for just $25M, under four per cent (Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025). The loud money sits with airlines, OTAs and tour operators, businesses selling the journey and the booking, not the experience at the end of it. That's the opening. The people spending big are competing to be the checkout. Thredbo can compete to be the reason for the trip, a far cheaper and more defensible position.
We've solved thisAcross our travel accounts we've driven ROAS north of 12x by owning destination intent instead of renting it back from the booking platforms.
Where the category money goes
The dollars cluster around booking, not destination.
Tour operators and OTAs alone command over $300M of category spend. Resorts sit at the bottom of the table. That imbalance is your unfair advantage, because it means destination demand for a place like Thredbo is under-contested by the deepest pockets.
Hotels and Resorts is the smallest slice of a $677M category · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
The timing problem nobody names
The category is loudest in January. Your biggest revenue is six months away.
Travel advertising peaks in January and bottoms out in December (Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025). That's the summer holiday and cruise-booking surge. Here's our read: your winter pass revenue, the core of the business, needs to be sold from autumn onward, precisely when category noise and CPMs are climbing back up. The early-bird window is where you should be buying attention, not fighting for it in peak.
Category peak sits opposite your winter selling window · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
We'd map your pass-sale calendar against category CPM curves and show you exactly which weeks are being overpaid for. Half an hour, no deck.
Just hit replyWhere the category still parks its money
A third of the category is still in newspapers.
Newspapers pulled $208M, more than digital and social at $193M (Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025). That skew is dragged up by cruise and tour operators chasing an older demographic. For a resort selling to families and 25-to-45s who book winter passes on a phone at 9pm, that legacy print weight means the channels where your booking actually happens are less contested than the topline suggests.
Legacy print still absorbs category dollars your buyers have already left · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
What you only learn from the inside
Things we know about selling snow that aren't on any dashboard.
A dump is a 48-hour window
A big overnight fall spikes booking intent for roughly two days, then decays fast. Budgets and creative have to be pre-loaded to fire on the snow report, not briefed after it.
Early-bird is risk transfer
"Save up to 50%" isn't margin sacrifice. It's banking revenue before the season's snow is known, moving weather risk from your P&L to the customer's. It should be sold as certainty, not as a sale.
Staggered school holidays are targeting
NSW, VIC and QLD school terms rarely align to the day. That's not a scheduling headache, it's three separate demand pulses you can weight budget and geo-targeting against, week by week.
Summer and winter are two audiences
Your MTB and hiking crowd and your ski families overlap far less than the shared brand suggests. Remarketing a winter pass buyer with a Gravity Pass burns budget on a mismatch. Segment hard.
Midweek is where margin lives
Weekends sell themselves. The prize is filling Tuesday to Thursday with retirees, remote workers and off-peak families, an audience you can acquire cheaper and who don't cannibalise your peak.
Partner brands buy your reach twice
The Range Rover Residency and ambassador content earn you first-party audiences and premium creative you can retarget against long after the activation ends. Most resorts let that data evaporate.
One honest comparison
What "good" looks like in travel, on our accounts.
These are our delivered results across Australian and New Zealand travel and tourism accounts, trailing twelve months. Directional, kept deliberately loose, but real numbers a competitor can't Google (Sunny first-party benchmark, as at Jun 2026).
Cost per purchase
under $20
On our better accounts, well below that, on pass and package sales.
Meta CPM
single digits
Snow-triggered creative kept efficient by loading it before the fall, not after.
Three things we'd look at first
Where we'd start, specifically.
01
Load the snow-trigger before the season
Build the fresh-snow creative, audiences and budget rules now, so a 12cm overnight fall auto-scales spend inside the two-day intent window instead of waiting on a brief. The demand is free, the readiness is not.
Track recordWe've run event-triggered budget scaling that turned reactive spend into predictable ROAS north of 12x.
02
Split summer and winter down to the pixel
Separate the MTB, hiking and summer audience from the ski funnel entirely, distinct creative, distinct remarketing pools. It stops the Gravity Pass being served to someone who just bought a winter pass, and vice versa.
Track recordAudience segmentation on our travel accounts has cut cost per purchase to under $20.
03
Sell early-bird as certainty, not discount
Reframe "up to 50% off" around locking in your season regardless of conditions. Buy the message in the autumn CPM trough, before the January category surge inflates everything, and bank the revenue while it's cheap to reach people.
Track recordWe've timed travel spend into the shoulder windows to hold single-digit CPMs against a rising category.
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. The interesting work starts once we can see your pass-sale curve, snow-report traffic and channel-level returns.
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.
3x to 5x
Return uplift on reallocated early-bird digital spend
The working, stated plainly: take your current early-bird digital spend, move it out of the peak category window into the cheaper autumn shoulder, then attach snow-triggered scaling. Our travel accounts have delivered ROAS north of 12x against a category that struggles to hold half that, so the same budget works materially harder.
The Sunny team · Travel & Tourism, Sunny Advertising